


providence

by sulfuric



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angels, Angst, Biblical References, Catholic Guilt, Eating Disorders, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Missing Persons, Mystery, a mess have fun, neither big parts of this but theyre There, what even is this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 06:49:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 90,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19057414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sulfuric/pseuds/sulfuric
Summary: In the middle of nowhere, there is a small, small town called Providence. In this town, the sun comes up, goes down, and comes up again, and nothing changes because everything already has.(Everything is fine until Thomas disappears. Newt has to find him without getting lost himself, which is a lot harder than it sounds.)





	1. avant

**Author's Note:**

> no sensical chapter boundaries we binge read like men
> 
> yall. prov has been a long time coming and has basically consumed the entirety of my creative energy for this whole past year. this one is really special to me, so i hope you guys like it. 
> 
> also. before we begin, i have to announce my endless love and gratitude to [gel](http://singt0me.tumblr.com) who has been supporting me literally every step of the way with this fic (and also everything else ive written and all of my general life tomfoolery) for what feels like one million years now. gel, i absolutely could not have pulled this off without you and i love you so so much to the ends of the earth!!!! this one’s for you.
> 
> also, you can watch the [trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJDdrZMRahM) if you'd like.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (i don't know where i am. where are you? can you hear me? are you listening?)

**prov·i·dence**

/ˈprävədəns/

_noun_

            the protective care of God or of nature as a spiritual power.

  
❧

 

In the middle of nowhere, there is a small, small town called Providence.

In this town, there is a boy named Newt.

In this town, there _was_ a boy named Thomas.

 

(There are two things he wishes he knew from the start: 1) fingers are very important, and you should never, under any circumstances, take anyone else’s; 2) don’t trust the angels.)

 

 

 

When Thomas isn’t there when Newt wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t even think to consider that anything might be wrong until he gets a text from Teresa that afternoon:

 

**From: reese murphy**

yo wtf did u do with my brother?? [2:38pm]

 

**To: reese murphy**

??? [2:39pm]

are you really asking me what i /did/ to tommy last night [2:39pm]

i truly don’t think you want to hear that teresa [2:39pm]

 

There’s the slightest twinge in his stomach, a feeling that something is distinctly _off_. He cranes his neck back to look at his nightstand. Thomas’ note is still sitting there: _out early today - love you,_ words accompanied by a lopsided smiley face scratched into Newt’s latest pack of sticky notes. Whenever he had to leave early, before Newt had woken up, Thomas always left a note. Even when he stayed, waiting for his boyfriend to finally arise much past the socially acceptable time of waking up, Thomas would often scribble whatever random garbage allowed itself to be a part of his stream of consciousness at the time, sticking his thoughts to Newt’s walls for him to find later.

He turns back to his phone, watching the _the other person is typing right now_ bubbles of doom bounce up and down on Teresa’s side of the conversation. His stomach twists again, the feeling sickeningly familiar.

 _He left a note_ , Newt tells himself.

 

**From: reese murphy**

ABSOLUTELY NOT fuck you [2:41pm]

tell him he needs to get his ass over here our mom is pissed [2:41pm]

and tell him to answer his gd phonej[2:41pm]

 

Ah, yes. There it is: Newt’s heart dropping into his stomach, disintegrating in the acid. His fingers fly over the screen, suddenly numb.

 

**To: reese murphy**

he left before i woke up??? had to do that thing with your mom for the thing at noon??? [2:41pm]

 

He fires off the text and then clutches his phone to his chest, face down, eyes darting over to the bedside table once more. Thomas’ phone is nowhere to be seen - just the clock, the sticky note pad, and a sharpie lie there. He definitely is not here anymore. Newt’s just about to get up and investigate the rest of the house in case he’s is out helping Sonya in the garden when his phone buzzes again.

 

**From: reese murphy**

?????? [2:42pm]

he hasnt been home since yesterdya [2:42pm]

 

**To: reese murphy**

wait one sec [2:42pm]

 

Newt flings the sheets off his body and stands up, ignoring the headrush that temporarily blinds him as he stumbles toward the door, groping for the handle. “Sonya?” he calls down the hallway, leaning on the wall for support as his vision clears. “you see Tommy this morning?”

She’s sitting in the kitchen, legs somehow crossed impossibly underneath her on a kitchen chair. “No, he left before I got up,” she says, not looking up from yesterday’s copy of the paper.

“Shit.”

Now she looks up. “What’s wrong?”

 _Busted._ Newt should really learn how to control his tone; he doesn’t even know if this is, like, a _thing_ , yet, he doesn’t need to worry his little sister for no reason. “Nothing, it’s just-” _It’s just that my boyfriend is lowkey missing in action and I’m having a bad feeling and this is all very d_ _éjà vu?_ “It’s nothing.”

She doesn’t say anything but gives Newt a decidedly pointed look.

“Really, it’s nothing. I gotta go,” he says, grabbing his keys off the counter.

“No trousers then?”  
He stops and looks down to see that he is, in fact, currently not wearing anything over his turquoise striped briefs that Thomas had so affectionately dubbed his “beetlejuice numbers” just the night before. He huffs a sigh and trudges back to his room, grabbing the first pair of jeans he sees without bothering to check if they’re clean or not.

“Everything good?” Sonya asks once he’s back in the kitchen, hesitant.

Newt tries his very best to make his words sound light and breezy. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be back in a bit.” He swipes his keys from the kitchen counter for the second time and forces a smile that is neither light nor breezy. “Everything’s fine.”

She’s clearly unsatisfied with his answer, but bites her tongue. “Don’t be stupid,” she says, chucking a granola bar at him. He knows he’s not going to be eating it, but he puts it in his pocket anyway. _That_ is not a fight he needs to have right now.

“Thanks.”

And with that, Newt is out the door.

 

In the car, his stomach nearly climbs up his throat and out onto the dashboard. If it wasn’t empty, it probably would have. He ignores the burning, driving at a much faster than reasonable speed across their small, damp town toward the northern outskirts - toward Thomas’ house, where he, _apparently_ , wasn’t.

The last time something like this happened, it didn’t end well.

The last time something like this happened, there were search parties.

The last time something like this happened, Newt effectively became an orphan.

The feeling of déjà vu only grows as the town’s buildings grow sparser, Thomas’ house getting larger on the horizon. Newt remembers it so clearly: biking this exact route, legs a lot stronger then, pedalling into the fog on the dirt beside the road. He was less panicked that time,  more paranoid than anything, mumbling to himself as he rode - _he can’t just be_ gone _, he wouldn’t just_ leave _, he wouldn’t_ \- but now, Newt knows for certain.

Something isn’t right.

As he pulls into Thomas’ driveway, Teresa is waiting for him on the porch. The next minute is a blur until he realizes that he’s hyperventilating and then Teresa’s grabbing onto his shoulders and saying words to his face that he definitely can only halfway hear.

“-okay, Newt?”

He blinks. She’s staring right at him, blue eyes as deep as ever. “What?”

“I said,” she starts, patient as always, but still with the slightest hint of tension in her voice, “that we’re gonna figure this out. It’s gonna be fine. It’s not - I know that’s where your brain wants to go right now, but I promise this isn’t happening again.” He forces a nod, feeling a miniscule amount of relief come over him as Teresa smiles. “Besides, this is _Thomas_ we’re talking about. He’s probably just off somewhere being a dumbass.”

“Yeah.” It slips out lamely. Newt does not feel very _yeah_ about any of this as Teresa leads him inside the house, pressing Thomas’ contact on her phone and holding it to her ear.

The statement comes with a shrug: “It’s ringing.”

 

Once Teresa’s left a moderately lengthy message in Thomas’ voicemail inbox, they head inside in search of air conditioning and parents, Teresa explaining what they know with an admirably level head. Both her mom and dad match that demeanor, and it’s not long into the discussion that Newt finds himself instilled with a similar calm, too. _There’s no use in getting all freaked out before we know what’s going on._

Her mom calls both hospitals in the city, tone jarringly cheery as she chats with her coworkers at the general, laughing. “You haven’t caught wind of my son doing anything to get himself brought in on my day off, have you?”

Her dad is a little less jovial, but still more or less neutral as he messages family, asking casually as possible if Thomas had decided to make any unannounced visits to any of his nearby relatives, even though the car that he and Teresa share is still parked in the driveway.

After both of those dead ends, it is decided that the four of them will split up and drive around town to look for him.

Newt takes Teresa in his car, and her and Thomas’ parents take theirs. Their parents decide to take the main parts of town, Newt and Teresa covering the school and the trails in the woods where Thomas liked to run in the mornings. Newt relays what Thomas was wearing the previous day, along with the clothes he kept at Newt’s house, and the two sweaters he always liked to steal. No one else is immediately alerted of the situation. Everyone keeps their ringers on.

This is when the calm begins to fade in earnest.

Teresa’s elbow pokes out the window, fingers tapping on the roof. The sound of it makes Newt want to roll them into the ditch. Not that they’re going fast enough for that, anyway - they’re crawling along the side of the road, looking. Thomas’ voicemail message plays from Teresa’s lap for the fourth time. She mashes the _end call_ button with her thumb.

She turns to Newt. “He say anything weird to you last night?”

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know,” she says, eyes back to the horizon, scanning. She pauses, uneasily. “Just weird.”

He rolls up to a stoplight and he regards her then, frown deepening. He clears his throat. “Teresa, weird how?”

She sighs and turns again to lean her back against the inside of the door, knee pulled into her chest. “You know.” Her eyes are dark, the rest of her sentence perched precariously on the edge of her lips, like: _don’t make me say it_. There’s another sigh, smaller, and then, “the angels.”

Oh.

Yeah, that.

The light turns green and Newt keeps his eyes fixed on the road ahead, their school visible in the distance.

The angels.

He swallows. “I don’t - I mean. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“And that is?”

“Well, you-”

Teresa’s phone goes off then, shrill ringtone only going off for a second before Teresa slams the phone to her ear. “Tom?”

The entire world hangs on their breath.

“Oh, no, hey mom. Yeah, no, nothing yet.”

Newt doesn’t hear the rest, but he swears he can hear the sound of his own blood pressure rising, veins tightening with each passing minute that Thomas remains gone. He lets the sound of his heartbeat pound thickly in his ears, and he doesn’t think about what Teresa said to him before the phone rang and then they fell silent again, looking for the boy who was still very much not there.

He makes a point not to say (or, think) _missing_ because they’re not quite there yet. It hasn’t been forty-eight hours and they’ve haven’t filed a missing persons report. They haven’t assembled official search parties and they haven’t made posters or sent out posts on Facebook for white middle-aged moms to share and then take no further action, feeling like they’ve done their humanitarian duty for the day.

No, they’re not there yet, but.

Words really are nothing but a formality, aren’t they?

 

Newt was two weeks shy of fourteen the day his dad vanished from town.

 

He remembers it more vividly than he’d like:

Sonya shook him out of a dream just after one in the afternoon, tears in her eyes threatening to spill over.

“I can’t find dad,” she said, sitting herself down on the edge of Newt’s bed. There was an edge of fear in her voice  that woke him up immediately.

“Did you-”

“I called him, yeah, straight to voicemail every time - which is eight times since this morning, just so you know. Called his work, said he didn’t show up this morning. Called Thomas’ mom, said there was no record of him at her hospital so I called the other one, down by-”

“Hey, hey, slow down.” Newt sat up, crossing his legs so that his knees were touching hers. He took a second to process everything she’d just said - even though she was barely eleven years old, she was a damn good person for an (apparent) crisis.

The first tear escaped onto her cheek, and Newt chose to tread lightly in hopes of preventing any further hysteria-bound spiralling. “Alright, well he’s not in the bloody hospital, that’s for sure.”

“I know, I checked. But I still haven’t called-”

Newt held up a hand, offering a soft smile despite the growing dread in the pit of his stomach. “Sonya. Breathe. It’s going to be alright.”

 

(It was not the first time - and certainly not the last - that he was wrong.)

 

Thomas is not at school, and he is not in town. He is not at the shops or the track, and he is not on any of his favourite running trails.

He is not in the woods.

 

The next day, Newt is scanning the spaces in between the trees with a flashlight just after dusk, this time with Sonya at his side. She’s uncharacteristically quiet, chewing her lip from the inside out as they walk silently, a couple dozen feet or so ahead of the rest of the search party.

 _Search party. Missing_. These are words that Newt can use now, because Thomas is officially a missing person and this is officially a search party, led by the town’s police department - which, in Newt’s experience, has been quite subpar thus far in any sort of search and rescue effort. Chilling familiarity settles into his bones and he ignores the feeling of watchful, pitying eyes darting onto the backs of him and his sister, like flies to a fresh lump of dog shit.

 

After his ride around town with Teresa and her parents had proven to be useless, panic had risen. Several facts were made known:

 

  1. Newt was the last person to see Thomas before he disappeared.



 

The fact that he was also the last person to see his dad before he disappeared is not lost on Newt. He was interviewed by the police that evening. One of the men - a salt-and-peppered, sneering rat of a man who had the audacity to be wearing a turtleneck in August - recognized Newt from the last time mystery had struck their damp, fog-blanketed town.

“Ah, Isaac, come in,” he’d said, shuffling some Thomas-related papers around on his desk. Newt didn’t correct him. He wanted to be out of there as soon as possible, no need to provoke unnecessary conversation. Unfortunately, he didn’t speak too soon.

Somehow, his voice sneers, too. “Oh, wait - you like to be called _Newt_ , don’t you?”

 

  1.  Both Thomas’ phone and wallet were nowhere to be found.



 

It’s not that surprising, seeing as he had them on him when he went to sleep at Newt’s that night. However, it’s also noted that both of his toothbrushes (the one at his own house, and the one he left at Newt’s) had remained in their respective places. None of his clothes were unaccounted for except the ones he’d been wearing, and his car was still parked in his own driveway, keychain left on the hook beside Teresa’s in their kitchen.

It’s not exactly the constituents of your typical runaway, but it’s not an impossibility. The phone and the wallet, or, lack thereof, warrant a thorough search of Newt’s entire house. Neither the police department nor his and Sonya’s getting-there-but-not-quite shambled bungalow are particularly big, but it’s still acutely upsetting to see three vaguely familiar men in police uniforms (the Rat Man absent, fortunately) rooting through all your shit and, if they’re feeling lucky, sealing it in thick plastic bags.

Sonya sat on the counter, cradling a mug of tea but not drinking it, head resting on her brother’s shoulder. Down the hall, two of the policemen share a hushed conversation:

“Look at this place. Where the hell are these kids parents?”

“Alec, these are the Ross kids. Remember Dan Ross, just up and vanished a few years back?”

“These are Dan’s kids? What about their mom?”

“Yeah, she’s gone, too. Think they have an aunt or something that got custody, but she hadn’t been around for a good while now. They’re completely alone.”

 

  1. The first 48 hours are the most crucial ones in any missing persons case.



 

Newt doesn’t want to think about that one.

He keeps his flashlight steady and ignores the fact that it’s been about 45 hours since he’d last seen Thomas, and tries not to think about what it means if they don’t find anything tonight.

Though, perhaps a worse thought, one that he does allow to slip through his mind, is what will happen if they _do_ find something tonight.

 

(Soon, he will look back and think, if only he had been so lucky.)

 

They end up using Thomas’ school portrait from the year before for the flyers and facebook posts. It’s a very special brand of surreal as Newt logs onto his facebook for the first time since everything happened and sees his boyfriend’s face plastered all down his feed. He shudders and then remembers how much Thomas hated the picture, hiding his student ID in his pencil case for the entirety of last year. Minho would always try to steal it from him, Teresa sometimes recruited in his (generally successful) efforts.

It’s awful, how upset a happy memory can make you feel under just the right circumstances.

It’s really not that bad of a picture, but it’s definitely not the best one they could’ve picked. For starters, it was taken last September - eleven months ago. Since then, Thomas had actually changed quite a bit. His braces had come off a week before Halloween ( _best Halloween ever_ , he’d said) and he’d shot up a few inches over the Winter (Newt remembers holding him through the colder nights, back and knees aching so much he could barely move). His hair is - was? - longer, now, and his jaw a bit stronger, too.

There were a million photos they could have used instead, and those are just the ones Newt has at hand on his phone. He can’t bear to look at them, not yet - the photo app on his phone untouched for four days now - but they’re there and they’re him. The longer that Newt stares at his laptop, the more this version of Thomas seems distorted, wrong. The text below blurs and warps and he shuts his eyes tight, closing out of facebook and opening a new tab.

And because he absolutely hates himself, he types _missing persons statistics_ into the search bar.

He learns that there are four main categories of missing children - abductions by other family members, abductions by strangers, runaways, and kids that just get plain old lost. Newt considers each one carefully, weighing the possibility of Thomas’ disappearance belonging to each category.

Abduction by other family members doesn’t seem likely, but he supposes it’s still possible. The police had already interviewed Teresa and her parents, and he’d seen Thomas’ uncle’s car parked in their driveway the last time he went by. Anyone related to him that saw him regularly was probably getting questioned as well.

Thomas having run away didn’t make sense either - he was an average white boy from an affluent family, in a long-term committed relationship with a loving family and no serious mental health issues other than a healthy dose of anxiety and a smattering of depression here and there. He was an athlete and got great marks. He didn’t have red flags in any of the typical risk factors for something like that. If he just wanted to get out of town for a bit, he had more than enough resources to do it in a normal person road-trip kind of fashion. It was Summer, for god’s sake - and if something was wrong enough for Thomas to feel like he had to disappear in the middle of the night, Newt would’ve known it.

(He would’ve known it - he would’ve, right?)

Getting lost made the least sense out of all of them. Their town was ridiculously small, and Thomas had lived there his entire life. He spent pretty much all of his free time walking or running around town or through the surrounding areas - the woods behind Newt’s house and the vast stretches of farmlands on rest of the town’s perimeter - so he knew it well enough. Even Newt was more than familiar with the denser routes of the woods, and the plain pastures they eventually thinned out to, so he definitely wasn’t lost. Besides, once you reached the fields, there was nothing to get lost _in_ , just farms for miles.

Abduction by a stranger was probably the least unlikely of them all, but it still didn’t feel right. Newt wasn’t sure if anyone who lived in town _really_ counted as a stranger because it was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, and it wasn’t the kind of place that people just passed through, either.

(People don’t tend to _pass through_ Providence.)

The more he thinks about it, the less it makes sense. It creates a whole new unsettled feeling in his gut, like an edge of relief immediately overtaken by something deeper, something much more sinister than all of this.

Against his better judgement, he reads on, finding some throat-seizing facts to erase any of that already short-lived relief he’d previously felt, the juiciest of those being that 40% of missing children in stereotypical kidnappings are murdered. He also learns that after seven years, you can legally declare a missing person to be dead. That information rings a dull, distant bell in the back of his head.

 

This becomes routine. Each day he sleeps well into the afternoon, with great effort pulling himself out of unconsciousness into the muggy haze of August’s early evenings, throat dry and legs weak. If there’s a search party, he’ll make Sonya and himself dinner before they head out with their flashlights. Sometimes Minho will be there, beforehand. None of them speak to one another. He’ll try to think of something to say to Teresa - his friend, practically his family, at this point - but he’ll always come up short, the two of them blinking at each other with their wide, red-rimmed eyes from across the way. He goes home and goes on his laptop, scrolling past the surrealism of Thomas’ height and weight broadcasted to the world and buries himself in statistics, collecting data and committing specific cases to memory until sleep finally grabs hold of him, thick and suffocating.

Slowly, the weeks trudge by in an awful haze. The search parties are fewer and farther in between and the police stop calling with questions. Thomas’ relatives leave town and Newt’s facebook feed starts to diversify again. The sun comes up and goes down and comes up again and nothing changes because everything already has.

 

And just like that, Thomas is gone.

 

September takes center stage and Newt walks out of homeroom only three minutes into the new school year.

Ten minutes after that, Minho is sitting on the swing adjacent to him at the park across the street. “This fucking sucks,” he says, stating what just very well may be the biggest understatement in all of human history.

Newt grunts in response, digging the heel of his shoe into the sand. He can sense that Minho wants to talk about this - and they should, really, Newt hasn’t said more than three words at a time for the past three weeks - but he’s not sure that he _can_. Not yet.

A minute later his prediction rings true. Minho’s voice is more watery than he was expecting. “I just. God. You hear about this kind of stuff happening, but you never think it’s gonna happen to you.”

Minho’s fingers curl and uncurl around the chains. Newt swallows. The police are useless. He doesn’t want to scare or worry Sonya more than she already has been. And there’s way too much guilt for him to even look at Teresa or her parents. He realizes then that if he’s gonna talk to anyone about any of this, it’s going to be Minho. He takes a breath.

“‘Specially not here.”

Minho’s eyebrows come together in confusion for just a second before he remembers his previous words. “Yeah. Especially not fucking here.” The words fall off at the end and they’re both silent again for a while. Maybe they’re not gonna _talk about it_ talk about it, not yet at least. For now, the quiet company of the other is enough for the both of them.

 

An hour later, there is a question with no earthly answer: “Where did he go, Newt?”

 

On the third day of school, Newt makes it through his first two classes and declares that reason enough to take the rest of the day off. He has a couple of hours to kill before he has to be at work, so he heads out to the east side of town, towards his house and the woods that lie just past it.

The walk is quiet, no cars passing him by as he makes his way. It’s unusually cold for this early into the month, but he doesn’t stop at home to grab a jacket. The air only grows cooler as he ventures deeper into the woods, though he pays no mind, walking until he reaches his destination:

The statue.

The gateway to Thomas’ obsession.

Newt will never forget the first time he saw it.

 

“You’re gonna _love_ it,” Thomas said, grabbing Newt by the wrist and pulling him further into the trees. This is pre-confessions, pre-realizations, but still post-butterflies. This is pre-paternal-disaster and pre-crackers-as-a-dietary-staple. This is Newt and Thomas, pre-Newt-And-Thomas.

This is twelve years old, and this is where it all begins.

More importantly, this is where it ends.

“What _is_ it, Tommy?” Newt said, nearly tripping over his own feet. Thomas led him through the trees at a much greater speed than he’d expected - he obviously knew the path by heart. Makes a kid wonder how much time his best friend was spending in _his_ backyard.

Thomas offered nothing but a smile thrown back over his shoulder, freckles almost dancing on his cheeks. Newt ignored the stirring in his stomach and focused on not falling over instead.

“Tommy-”

“Shush, we’re almost there.”

Eventually, their pace slowed and Thomas led Newt out into a clearing of sorts, unfamiliar and overgrown enough that Newt could tell that no one had been there in a long time. Thick grass grew in patches, large capped mushrooms and fallen tree logs since repurposed by other organisms lay scattered about. Streams of sunlight poked through the covering overhead, illuminating random patches of ground. Then, in the middle of it all, the main event stood towering over them in all it’s frightening glory:

An angel, deliberately carved in stone, standing with wings folded and a sword in one hand, set of weighing scales balanced delicately in the other. A thin layer of moss stretched across its form.

Newt stopped cold, feet planted in the earth.

Thomas just about floated over, spinning around with a massive grin on his face. “Isn’t it amazing?”

Awe rendered Newt speechless until he eventually choked out a weak “Yeah.” He tested his legs again, finding he had control of them after all and took a few steps forward, stopping about a metre back of where Thomas stood, hands on his hips. “Has this always been here?” he asked then, trying and failing to recall ever seeing the statue in what was technically his own backyard.

Thomas reached out and let his fingers land in the crook of the angel’s elbow, sending a shiver down Newt’s spine. “No idea,” Thomas said, looking back, “I thought you’d know.”

Newt shook his head. “Never seen it.”

“Weird.”

And then, with the nonchalance and unbotheredness that only two twelve year olds could possess in a moment as such, they moved on.

 

It became, as one might say, a thing.

They went back to the statue on the weekends when they had nothing better to do. Sometimes they’d bring their homework, but most of the time it was just the two of them, talking about everything or nothing or sometimes not talking at all, just sitting and enjoying each other’s company. Newt would bring a book from the library - mostly fiction, but by the time eighth grade rolled around he’d picked up a liking for history as well - and Thomas would often sketch, always the angel.

Looking back, Newt doesn’t remember if it was always _the_ angel or just _some_ angel. There might have been different ones, but no matter what, it was always an angel that he drew.

 

Later that year, Thomas did his speech for English class on the mythology of biblical angels. Newt was planning on doing his on the library of Alexandria, but ended up choosing the Venus transits of 1761 and 1769 instead. Teresa decided to talk about why people have fears of public speaking (definitely not to combat her own, no sir) and Minho had managed to snag that year’s most coveted speech topic: the impending apocalypse of 2012.

They all sat on the floor of the town’s library together, Newt shooting apologetic glances to the librarian (Mary - Newt was there often enough that they were on a first name basis by that point) whenever they got too loud. It had actually ended up being a pretty productive study session, or as much as it could be for a group of thirteen year olds. They stayed until the street lights switched on, biking toward their respective homes in the muted orange of late Fall.

As Thomas and Teresa split off from Newt and Minho onto the main road stretching east to west, Newt swore he could see his friend muttering to himself as he balanced the books that wouldn’t fit in his bag on his handlebars.

Thomas was the only one in the whole class to get 100% on his presentation.

 

Then, just months earlier, days before Summer started:

“Don’t those things give you the creeps?” Newt blinked up at Thomas, moving his head from where it lay on his chest to jerk his chin toward the small collection of angel figurines clumped together on the shelf above his desk. He turned back to him, widening his eyes for effect. “Watching over you all the time? Like, when your boyfriend is sucking your dick?”

Thomas considered, suppressing a laugh. He was still covered in a thin layer of sweat. “No,” he decided, shifting his neck on the pillow slightly, “I like to think they’re more like guardian angels.”

 

Now, Newt standing in front of the statue, in all its glory. It’s menacing. It looms over him. It looks ready to strike, sword pulled back behind its head. He has no idea how this was ever a comforting presence to Thomas. Standing there alone, Newt realizes that this is the first time he’s been to their spot without him, and first time since Thomas went missing. It feels like there are eyes in the forest, surrounding him. He goes to pull his jacket closer to him but realizes he doesn’t have one, as per the genius of ten-minutes-ago Newt. The cold creeps in and he starts to shiver, legs shaking. A breeze makes itself known, shuffling the grass across his shoes.

The angel’s scale teeters from side to side.

The trays are empty.

 

That afternoon, he takes his post at the library’s checkout desk and prays to all the angels and gods that no one needs help finding anything that night. He has his own stack of books piled high beside him, the spines familiar despite having never read any of them. He’d pulled them from the shelves at random, letting his subconscious do the work of figuring out Thomas’ old favourites from the religion and mythology sections.

The beginnings of a thunderstorm rumble quietly outside. Newt takes out a notebook and a pen, sighs, and begins.

 

Time drags forward with no resolution. It’s a cold, grey October morning and Newt sits at  the kitchen table with Minho, calculus homework spread out in front of them. Minho is half-heartedly deriving a simple quadratic when Newt sighs for the fourth time since they’d woken up.

“What if we look on his laptop?”

Minho’s head comes up then, eyebrows drawn together in confusion. “What?”

“Like, his laptop. What if he left a note, or a clue, or something?” The words already sound stupid before they come out of his mouth. Lately, everything he does feels like grasping for straws that don’t exist.

Minho isn’t convinced either. “A clue?” He’s using his _it’s-too-early-for-this_ voice, which is not encouraging.

“Fuck, I don’t know, man.” Newt pauses, sinking to let his chin rest on the table. “I’d take anything at this point.”

“I know, dude. Me too.” Minho offers the smallest, saddest smile that Newt’s ever seen and they go back to pretending to do their homework in silence. Thomas and Teresa were always the smartest of the four of them, and Newt feels their absence like a sore on the inside of his lip, one he keeps accidentally biting down on every time he looks at the two empty seats beside him. He’d texted Teresa the night before asking if she wanted to come over and study with them in the morning, but it had gone unanswered.

A couple of minutes later, Minho’s voice takes Newt out of his Teresa-themed spiral of thoughts. “I think the police still have it - his laptop, I mean.”

Newt’s just about to shoot a reply when the back door slides open, Sonya coming through it with a crate filled with freshly harvested beetroot. “Yeah, they do,” she confirms, having heard Minho’s previous statement through the glass like some supernatural being or other. She breezes past them and hauls the crate onto the kitchen counter. “Teresa told me last week that they asked for it back, but Janson wouldn’t let them.”

 _Janson_ . _That’s that dick’s name._ Newt stops. “Teresa told you that?” Clearly, she was picking and choosing whose texts she wanted to answer. Newt didn’t blame her, but still. He has the right to feel a _little_ offended.

“Yeah,” Sonya says, cheeks reddening just a bit. Newt opens his mouth but bites his tongue at the last second - if Minho weren’t here, he would have been _all_ over that.

Minho abandons both his pencil and any sense of tact. “Teresa’ll reply to your texts but not ours? Damn.”

Sonya scoffs, tossing a wet, dirt covered cloth at him. “She’s my friend too, asshole. Just ‘cause I’m not in your grade doesn’t mean I can’t have friends that are.” Minho’s jaw drops, scandalized, as the cloth lands on his shoulder, and Newt watches on in amusement. “Besides,” she adds, “it was when I went to drop off their carrots and cabbage on Friday.”

“Speaking of, can I get some carrots later today?”

“Sure, if you actually pay for them.”

“But Lizzy, I’m starving. I’ll die!”

“You’ve only been here for four days, Minho, you’re not starving yet.”

Newt doesn’t interject, content to watch his best friend and his sister bicker in silence. It’s quite the balance they have going on between the two of them, something halfway between your classic TV older brother and sister and an actual, genuine friendship. Newt’s lucky - Sonya is his only family, he wouldn’t be able to manage if Minho (also at this point considered his family, after all these years) didn’t like her, or vice versa. It’s nice to know that if he had to jet off to work for a last minute shift, he wouldn’t feel weird or awkward leaving the two of them alone together. Hell, these days, it actually made him feel _better_ that they’d have each other when Newt wasn’t there.

Minho was the only one that could get away with calling her by her real name, let alone a nickname born from it. She was named Elizabeth, after their mother, but once she’d died, their dad had insisted on using her middle name, instead. Sonya didn’t know their mother - she’d confided in Newt that she only really had one or two real memories of her before she passed - but she’d adopted the same steadfast insistence as her father, anyway. Newt never told her, but he liked Sonya best.

He tunes back in to hear her patiently explaining to Minho that zucchini season is well over and that if he wants mediocre imports, he could bike over to the grocery store and get them there. Newt turns with a snort to look out in the backyard, condensation from overnight still dripping off the walls of the greenhouse.

The greenhouse. It’s pretty much the only reason they’ve stayed alive these past two years. It was their mother’s, back when she was alive. Newt has vague, muddled memories of a room full of flowers, colour bursting from every surface possible. He has clearer memories of rot and greyish browns, sitting untouched in their backyard for years. But now it’s alive again, because of Sonya.

A week after their dad disappeared - long enough for hope to deflate but not long enough for the manic energy of it all to fizzle out - an eleven year old Sonya had gone out back with a handful of yard waste bags and uprooted the entire thing, bringing the space to working order in three days. Since then, she’d become the town’s unofficial provider of seasonal vegetables, making deliveries with her bike and its comically huge basket. It earned enough money - along with Newt’s job at the library - to keep their heads above the water. And despite how underfed they were, (which, considering the fact that they weren’t all that well off back when they _had_ parents, was saying a lot, especially in Newt’s case) it was Sonya that made sure they at least got all the vitamins and minerals they needed.

She was more like her mother than she’d ever know.

“ _Neeewwt_ ,” she drawls then, staring at him like _where the hell did you go_ as he snaps back to reality.

He blinks. “Yes.”

A sigh. “You’re useless.”

“Oh, I know.”

The next afternoon, the three of them are sitting at the kitchen table sorting out vegetable orders and Teresa slips in through the back door, backpack clutched to her chest. “I got it,” she says, out of breath.

“Nice!” Minho jumps up from his spot, bounding over to usher her inside and closing the door behind her. There’s a ghostly hint of a smile on her face to counteract the red ringing her eyes, skin deepening to a dull purple along the bottoms of her eyelids.

“Hi, Teresa,” Sonya says, almost shyly, and Teresa gives her an earnest smile back. Minho takes the backpack from her and sets it on the table with a dull _thunk_. Teresa inhales down at it, looking nervous but mildly excited.

Newt, on the other hand. “So, um?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sonya bounces back, “you were zoned out yesterday when we were talking about this but Minho wanted to steal Thomas’ laptop back from the police which is obviously illegal so we texted Teresa about it and she said she’d see what she can do, so.”

“So,” Teresa continues, “I went in this morning and started crying and told them that there was this one picture of my brother and I that was on his computer that I really wanted to have and - technically that isn’t a lie, by the way, he has all the pictures from when we went to Arizona - anyway, so I went and they were like ‘fine’ cause I’m a girl and pretty and my twin brother is a missing person so they let me have a couple minutes to find the picture and send it to myself but I also downloaded his entire hard drive to my external so we have everything that’s on his computer without _technically_ stealing evidence.”

Three pairs of eyes blink as she gulps in a big breath of air, breathing heavily. “This is the picture, by the way,” she tacks on quietly, showing off her lock screen of her and Thomas posing triumphantly on top of a reddish mountain.

“Who _are_ you?” Minho asks, slamming his hands down on the table.

Teresa lets out a tiny grin, whites of her eyes making the circles under them appear even darker. “I don’t even _know_ , man.”

Newt shakes his head, deciding to reconcile this master con artist Teresa with the goody two shoes once-cited-the-dictionary-on-a-paper Teresa another day. “So, we have his computer?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” she answers, grabbing one of the carrots of the counter and biting the end of it. No one mentions it.

“Good work, Murphy,” Minho says.

“Thanks,” she chirps, “It was just sitting there in lockup, like, still in the sealed bag they took it in, like. Two months ago, almost? Yeah. Good to know they’re taking this investigation seriously!”

The table is silent for one awful second, three faces suspended in poorly-concealed horror before Sonya breaks the tension. “Have you looked at it yet?”

“Oh, no, not yet. I figured my missing slash maybe dead brother wouldn’t want his twin sister finding his porn stash, so I thought I’d let Newt or Minho do it.”

“Nice,” Minho says earnestly, nodding as if she’d just told him she promised her very sizeable inheritance to starving children in third-world countries.

Newt hums, suppressing a probably inappropriate laugh, given the circumstances. “Good call. I can do the first sweep of everything.”

“Hmm, yeah, thanks.”

 

It’s only at the prime hour of 4:33am that Newt can manage to finally look at Thomas’ desktop, courtesy of Teresa’s top secret external computer Thing. Forgive him if he doesn’t remember the name - it is, after all, as they say, ass o’clock, when he connects said Thing to his own laptop as per Teresa’s instructions.

His screen blacks out for a second and he momentarily wonders if he did something wrong, but then it flickers to life again, a picture of Newt and Thomas filling the screen. It floods Newt with a feeling of absolute fondness and then an overwhelming loss, in that order, a rise and fall resulting in a set of hot tears brimming in his eyes, threatening to spill over.

He’s seen the photo countless times, in class or at the library, or during late night Netflix viewings at Thomas’, when it was far too late to acceptably use the living room TV - or even be awake, for that matter. It’s been Thomas’ desktop for almost as long as they’d been together: he and Newt walking, holding hands, looking back at the camera and laughing in a moment of pure, candid happiness. Newt’s kind of making a face in it and Teresa took it while they were all walking so it’s definitely a little blurry, but he can see the aesthetic quality she was probably going for in the first place.

He remembers the day perfectly: it was the second week of freshman year, and the first day the four of them realized that they were allowed to leave the school grounds during lunch. Newt and Thomas were still a bit shy being affectionate in front of Minho and Teresa, despite having been officially together for the entire Summer. Now, he knows that the two of them had spent almost all of eighth grade secretly complaining to each other about he and Thomas’ oblivious flirting. But back then? Still quite the scandal to him to be holding Thomas’ hand at all, let alone in public.

He can still hear Teresa calling out from behind them: _Smile, lovebirds!_ Her phone had been raised up to her face, brace-filled smile in full force as she snapped a burst of photos. After Thomas had snatched the phone and weeded the selection down to the ones he found acceptable, he’d spent the entire lunch distracting Newt from trying to steal his or Teresa’s phone.

The next morning, Thomas showed up at his doorstep before school with the photo encased in an ornate frame.

Now, with the glow of his laptop illuminating the otherwise dark room, Newt can just make out the form of them, twisting back toward Teresa with goofy, embarrassed smiles plastered onto their faces. The frame sits on his desk, last month’s unfinished history assignment splayed out haphazardly in front of it like a murder victim.

He spends an hour or so alternating between staring at the screen and staring at the wall, making sure to move his finger along the trackpad every once in a while. The last time he checked, Thomas’ screensaver was literally just a slideshow of all his favourite pictures of the four of them together over the years, the fucking sap. That is not something that Newt can handle, at the moment.

A deep turquoise is starting to emerge from the horizon when Newt musters the strength to open the file explorer. He goes to documents, then scrolls through with a sigh. He doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be looking for - some kind of clue as to where he might have gone, a farewell? That’s working off the assumption that he just left, and wasn’t taken.

Newt sighs again, louder, and rubs his fists into his eyes. The clock on his bedside table reads _6:11am_. It feels like he hasn’t slept in weeks. No substantial news has been released about the investigation since school started. As far as Newt knew, they still didn’t know what happened to Thomas, much less any sort of reasonably informed starting point for where to look for him. Newt could be searching his computer as much for a suicide note as message logs with some child abductor, for all he knew.

He continues scrolling, eyes waiting for something like _train_tickets.pdf_ or _plans-to-skip-town.doc_ to jump out at him. Unsurprisingly, there is nothing of the sort. All he finds are folders labelled _School_ and _Adobe_ and _Reference_ and _School (old)_. That last one? Not school stuff.

There’s a particular folder, however, that catches Newt’s eye: _Research._

He doubleclicks, watching the screen fill up with subfolders and word documents and images, some of them obviously named but mostly nonsense. The scrollbar on the side of the window is tiny, the folder filled with hundreds of files. He’s never seen any of it before, but Newt instantly knows.

 

(He recalls Teresa from that afternoon, suggesting that Newt or Minho be the first to look at Thomas’ computer - the way her voice lowered just a bit, eyes shifting uneasily to him as she spoke his name.

And he knows. He knows that she knows, too. To exactly what extent he can’t be sure, but he’s certain it’s much more than Minho or Sonya or her parents or the police.

 

On a biting January morning, she would tell him in a whisper:

“I got them too. Glimpses.”

“Of the angels?”

Then, his seventeenth birthday, with a single strawberry cupcake sitting untouched in its box on the table. Regret in the air thicker than frosting, words without sweetness:

“I already lost him, I can’t lose you too.”

“He’s not dead, Teresa.”

 

He knows, she knows. But neither of them know that this is not enough.)

 

November comes and goes quickly, cold quietly settling into the bones of their small town. Newt spends most of the month in the library, thawing in the glorious tax-funded heat for the first ten minutes of each shift he works. That month, they get a new digital sorting system to prototype before it goes out to the bigger branches in the city. He and Mary have more fun than they should testing it out, finding all the bugs and faults in the system so they can report back to the higher ups on what works and what doesn’t.

She doesn’t ask him about Thomas. By that time the searches have stopped, community equilibrating back to its quiet, uninvolved state. He can tell that she _wants_ to ask, stare lingering in the peripherals of Newt’s vision, then suddenly darting away as soon as he comes to meet it.

She doesn’t ask, and for that he is grateful. He’s been able to bullshit and avoid his way through the rest of his life for the past three months, but Mary is the probably one person he just can’t fool. There would be no point in even trying, a breakdown rumbling on the horizon of his mind just _thinking_ about her soft, quiet voice, asking how he’s _doing_ , in that specific sort of tone that tells you that this is no longer small talk.

He would tell her, but she doesn’t ask.

 

December arrives with the smell of cinnamon boiling on the stove, assaulting Newt’s nostrils with nostalgia and warmth the second he wakes up.

It’s a welcome change, for once.

The first day of the last month had recently become a new tradition in the Ross household. This was only the third year of its existence, but Sonya had been very adamant on repeating the feast of the past two years. This year, the first had fallen on a Sunday, which was the best case scenario given the rather involved nature of it all.

A cup of tea is waiting on the counter for Newt when he manages to drag himself out of bed at the ungodly hour of 10:13am. There’s a matching one, nearly emptied, sitting next to it. He looks up to catch a quick glimpse through the back window of his sister as she slips inside the greenhouse, looking ridiculous in her bright teal pajama pants and Newt’s massive winter jacket. He has a feeling that she’s wearing flip flops to complete the look. Her hair is a flash of frizz, still in the previous night’s braids that she’ll later turn into perfect waves by some form of witchcraft.

An arsenal of seasoning is arranged by the stove, and a bright yellow sticky note hangs on for dear life to the peppercorn. _need to pick up chestnuts!_ He’s unsure if the note is meant as an order for him or just a reminder for Sonya herself, but Newt smiles at it anyway. She often leaves them lying around the house, more nonsense than anything. At Thanksgiving the year before, Thomas had gotten Sonya a pack of sticky notes because he’d noticed her forgetting things all the time, just like he did. Also, because he was the kind of person that got people gifts on fucking Thanksgiving.

Before the memory sours his morning, Newt takes his mug to the table, sitting down and letting the steam warm his face. He really should be out there helping Sonya with the harvest for their meal, but he’s only been awake for fifteen minutes, so.

The tradition of December first entails the preparation and consumption of a massive batch of Winter vegetable stew, all but two or three items from a very long list of ingredients coming from Sonya’s garden. In the past two years, it’s resulted in leftovers lasting them almost all the way to Christmas. Though most things involving food gave Newt an acute sense of dread, this wasn’t one of them. He would even go so far as to say that he was _looking forward_ to his assigned duty of peeling potatoes at the kitchen counter while Sonya took care of the less hardy vegetables. Last year, he’d even taste-tested the soup for her at its several stages, making the executive decision to add salt or pepper. Though that was pretty much it in terms of actual decision making; saying that his palate was lacking would be generous. And when it came time to actually eat the meal, he did so nearly guilt-free. The bread that went along with it was another story, but hey, the stew - that was untainted, as of yet.

In previous years, they’d had company.

The first year it was Thomas and Teresa, an oddly formal esoteric family dinner a good five months after Newt and Thomas’ awkward adolescent courtship had evolved into a slightly less awkward adolescent relationship. Things were still settling back then, but they were well on their way, everyone going back for seconds and thirds before the night was done.

The next year was the trio of Newt, Sonya, and Sonya’s best friend, Harriet. She was a polite girl with a sharp sense of humour and take-no-shit attitude, even as young as she was. Newt liked her well enough, but he’d always held an air of hesitation around the girl, voluntary or not he wasn’t quite sure - she was smart, and caught on to things quick. She wasn’t often quiet, but when she was it set Newt off a bit, like somehow she knew all his secrets.

He really did try to make an effort with Sonya’s friends, especially with how much she gets along with his. Harriet was her closest friend and they’d met in elementary school. Both her parents worked in the city and she had an older sister, already moved out and out of town. Then there was Aris, an only child who had moved to town from the city with his mom for god knows what reason. He’d started at their school the year their dad disappeared, and despite only knowing Sonya for a few months prior, Aris had apparently been a massive help through the whole thing. The first time he’d officially met Thomas, he’d nearly choked when Newt said _boyfriend._ After that, Newt noticed the way he regarded Thomas. Thomas himself once described it as “the kind of look that only a baby gay could manage”. And he was right, really. Aris was kind of a twink.

Neither of them were going to be making an appearance at this year’s dinner, and both Minho and Teresa were preoccupied for the weekend.

Just him and Sonya, then.

She comes in a minute later just as he’s finishing his tea, and smiles wide. “You actually woke up!”

“Bloody miracle, I know,” Newt responds. He eyes the crate of vegetables cradled in her arms, then smiles to himself.

She’s wearing flip flops.

 

Christmas passes without much note. Everyone agrees that this year feels like there’s a lot less to celebrate than normal.

Minho leaves with his parents to spend time with his family in the city. The morning that he leaves, he shows up on Newt’s doorstep and hugs him for three entire minutes. He doesn’t need to say anything; Newt knows.

(He texts him every day for the whole two weeks that he’s gone.)

Teresa, as far as Newt knows, stays in town, but he doesn’t hear much from her besides the odd blurry snapchat of the christmas lights in her room (which she keeps up year-round) just so that he knows shes alive. He appreciates the sentiment.

It was always her and Thomas’ favourite holiday.

 

The time between Christmas and New Year’s is liminal, and Newt somehow ends up reversing his sleeping schedule. All it takes is one particularly late sleep-in: he and Sonya had spent Christmas night staying up late in her room, fairy lights (given to her by Thomas and Teresa the previous year after seeing how enamoured she was with Teresa’s own) blinking weird shadows onto their faces as they reminisced about the holidays that actually felt like holidays, when no one was missing and school was the only thing they needed a break from. It is 4:00am by the time they get to sleep and 4:00pm by the time Newt finally comes out of it, groggy and thoroughly confused by both the lack of light outside and the bed that is not his.

 

It’s those five days (or, rather, nights) that nearly break him.

The sixth saves him.

 

The first night, Sonya heads off to bed and warns him not to stay up too late. He ends up finding a sudden burst of energy and works through all of the assignments he’d missed up until that point in the school year. Somewhere around 8am he peripherally notices Sonya coming quietly into the kitchen, then doing a double take when she sees him sat in the exact same spot she’d left him, cross-legged on the living room floor muttering to himself about chemical equations.

The second night, he decides to stay in the living room again. He finds himself avoiding his room lately, more so as the weather grows colder. Thomas was, for lack of a better term, a cuddle whore, whose tendencies were only augmented when the weather got like this. Even wrapped up in his duvet and extra fleece blanket, Newt’s bed feels much too big this time around.

He spends most of his night staring out the back doors, thoughts floating around languidly as he zones in and out of reality. It feels like only an hour has passed when Sonya hurls a pillow at him at 1:00am, telling him to stop being a zombie.

The third night, he wakes up after Sonya’s gone to bed again, missing her completely. Alone with his laptop and his thoughts, he boots up Teresa’s external Thomas laptop machine and copies all the files from his _Research_ folder and pastes them onto his own desktop. He reads through what feels like every single word document, absorbing pages upon pages of information - angel names and origins and meanings, some of them accompanied by Thomas’ own notes, mostly nonsense. He writes the names of the ones that appear more than five times in his notebook, and highlights the ones that Thomas drew. He takes the information at face value, brain unable to take in and process at the same time. He does not dwell on the meanings and he does not try to figure out why the ones that are important, are.

He does dwell, however, on the lists.

There is a single unnamed folder with a single unnamed word document inside. It is fifteen pages long and full of bullet point lists, none of them with any discernible connection or meaning. Some of them make enough sense, like the one that just lists all the archangels. There are others whose meanings are anyone’s guess, symbols and phrases with absolutely no significance he can recall, no matter how hard he tries.

There is no order and no organization - it haunts him, chill seeping into his bones. Thomas, though a very scrambled, chaotic mess of a person on the surface, is actually maybe the most systematic of them all - Newt had come to realize, over the years, that Thomas had his own esoteric way of sorting things. No matter how much he tried to figure out _why_ he did the things he did, the way he did, Newt could never crack it, and these lists are no exception.

But even despite his usual tendencies, something seems off about this in particular.

The fourth night, he writes his own list, jammed into the mess of his notebook underneath the scramble of words scratched out and rewritten where he’d tried to make sense of Thomas’ research.

Earlier that day, before Sonya had gone to sleep for the night, she’d said, in that ever-increasing tone of worry normally reserved for 8:00pm breakfast interventions, “I think you should write out your New Year’s resolutions.”

It’s not quite how he was expecting the sentence to end. Sonya did this often, expressing her concerns in the form of a very non-imposing, casual suggestion. _I think you should -_ Newt had to admit that it was an effective way for her to be heard without pissing him off too much. _I think you should not blow off that history assignment, Newt. I think you should perhaps consider a hat in his blizzard, Newt. It’s been three days, I think you should eat something, Newt._ That reminds him - it’s been a while. He should probably eat something. _I think you should -_ she’s been delicately phrasing things like this for a couple of years now, ever since one particular blowout three weeks post-dadpocalypse that Newt isn’t particularly proud of.

 

(“I don’t need you managing me!”

“Oh, ‘cause you’re doing such a bang-up job on your own. You need-“

“You don’t know what I bloody need! What I need is to provide for this fucking family-“

“That’s not your job, Newt, that’s Dad’s-“

“Dad’s not coming back! He’s not!”

Hot tears burn down her cheeks. ”Alright, so maybe he’s not. Then what good is starving yourself to death gonna do for this _family_?”

He blinks, and then, calmly, “We don’t have any fucking money, Sonya. I’m conserving resources.”

And this eleven year old’s mouth: “Fuck your resources, you fucking twat.” She wipes the tears off her face violently, then gets up and storms out of the house without another word.

He remembers thinking, that all this would be so much easier for him if she didn’t care so much about everyone and everything.)

 

The exact same spots, nearly three years later: Newt blinks incredulously over at his sister and tries to recall the last time he even _made_ a resolution, New Year’s or otherwise.

“I also think that you should, perhaps, sleep like a normal person,” she adds with a hint of smugness in her voice and Newt thinks, _ah, yes, there it is._ He takes a minute to seriously consider and Sonya continues matter-of-factly. “Mine are to get all 80s - or higher - in school, convert Harriet into an Adventure Time fan, and finally get Minho to eat celery.”

Oh, to be young and slightly less burdened. “Attainable,” he says, nodding. “Oh, wait, the Minho thing. Mmm.”

“You’ll see.” She smiles and squeezes Newt’s hand. He chooses to ignore whatever deeper meaning she may be trying to communicate and just appreciates the moment, happiness shallow however still that - _happiness_.

 

After she’s gone to bed, he swims past the happy and goes right into the deep end.

The notebook sneers at him from the coffee table. He writes the words _reasons he would leave_ and underlines it twice. Between 3:00am and sunrise he accumulates several points:

 

reasons he would leave 

\- this town is garbage  
\- someone made him do it  
\- some _thing_ made him do it  
\- problem with parents???  
\- problem with something else?????  
\- he didn’t

 

The sun starts to filter through the backyard and Newt sighs, heavily, into his notebook. He wonders if Thomas is seeing this, wherever the hell he is. The boy rarely missed a sunrise and after four of them, Newt can understand why. It’s quiet. If he’d eaten in the past 48 hours and wasn’t on the verge of a serious breakdown, he might even find it peaceful.

It’s a crappy list. None of them are solutions and none of them are resolutions.

He thinks that maybe, his resolution should be to find Thomas.

He also thinks that maybe, he should drop dead.

 

On the fifth night, he’s so deeply entranced in an article on biblical weaponry that he almost doesn’t hear his phone ringing, the bubblegum voice of Ms Carly Rae Jepsen asking Newt to call her, maybe.

(The day the song came out, Minho demanded that Newt figure out how to create custom ringtones on his phone.)

He accepts the call with only moderate trepidation. “Hello?”

“Should I be worried about this?”

“Hm?”

Minho huffs an annoyed sigh, then starts up again. “Do I need to be worried about this?”

“ _This_ being what, exactly?” he stalls, knowing damn well what his friend is referring to.

He sees through it, obviously. “Don’t bullshit me, man. Sonya’s been texting me all week about how she’s only seen you like, twice. She didn’t even use emojis.”

 _Shit._ Newt didn’t think she was _that_ worried about him. He drags a hand down his face and glances at the corner of his laptop screen - _2:03am._ “Mm.”

Minho sighs again, static crackling through the phone. “Listen, if you need me to steal my mom’s car and come over there, it’s only an hour drive.”

He bites back a smirk even though Minho’s not there to see it. “Have you forgotten that you don’t know how to drive?” he asks matter-of-factly.

“Shut up, I’m serious. Besides, it can’t be _that_ hard.”

“I think you might be seriously overestimating your skills here, Min.”

There’s some rustling through the receiver then, like Minho’s dropped his phone and is shaking it in a box of cereal, and another sigh. “Seriously, though. Please try and take care of yourself.”

And there’s something in his tone then that is carrying so much purpose that it fills Newt with emotion, overflowing suddenly and making his throat feel tight. He wills his voice not to break. “I know.” It comes out as a strained whisper. “I just-” he cuts himself off, frustrated.

“Yeah,” Minho responds, “me too.”

They sit together and apart like that for a couple more minutes, just listening to the sound of breathing through the line. And if Minho hears Newt sniffling softly, he doesn’t say anything about it.

It’s after that phone call that Newt resolves to at least somewhat attempt to get his shit together and stay awake through the next day, pulling a reverse all nighter. It’s not the most comfortable experience, but it’s not as bad as he’d imagined. The sunlight helps. When evening rolls around again, he finds he’s been enlisted to leave the house for what might actually be the first time in a week.

“So the party is at Harriet’s?” He’s sitting in the driver’s seat, waiting for the car to warm up. Sonya rolls her eyes beside him, little huff of breath coming out in a visible puff.

“No, we’re just getting ready at Harriet’s. After that her sister is taking us and Aris to Rachel’s.”

“So the party’s at Rachel’s?”

“Yes.”

“That’s confusing.”

“It’s really not.”

Newt realizes in that moment that his sister is already a lot cooler than he ever was or probably ever will be. Sonya was going to a legit party and however much that worried Newt, it also made him just a little bit proud.

“Are you nervous?” he asks once they pull out of the driveway, careful not to hit any snowbanks.

Sonya shrugs. “I don’t know. No?” Something about the way she hugs her bag to her chest just a little tighter tells him that yes, she is.

Newt nods slightly, throat tightening just a bit as he realizes that this experience - the awkward drive to their first-ever high school party - is something that most kids have with their parents. He’s pretty sure he’s got the big brother thing down, but. There are some spaces in Sonya’s life that Newt will never be able to fill.

“Well I don’t have much experience going to parties, but-”

“Newt, I don’t need a lecture,” Sonya groans, equal parts mortified and annoyed.

“Let me have this, Son. Okay, if you’re gonna be drinking - even if you’re not gonna be drinking, always watch-”

“I’m not gonna be drinking!”

“You’re not?”

“No, I’m like, fourteen, Newt. And I know, watch my drink, watch my friends’ drinks, don’t accept drinks you didn’t see people pour or open, and don’t drink anything that’s been left unattended,” she rattles them off, counting on her fingers.

Newt pulls up to a stop sign and looks over at his sister. “Well, shit.”

“I know. I’m a smart kid. I don’t know how you handle my shining presence every single day.”

“Oh, shut up,” Newt laughs. He reaches over to ruffle her hair and is met with tiny hands swatting at the speed of light. “Text me if you need anything. Anything. Make sure Harriet and Aris have my number, too.”

“I know, I know.”

“Text me when you get to the party, and when you leave. And when you get back to Harriet’s.”

“Gee, want me to text you when I use the loo, too?”

“I mean-”

“Newt! No!”

“Relax, relax,” he says, pulling onto Harriet’s street as Sonya loops an arm through her backpack strap, ready to swing it over her shoulder and bail the second the car stops.

The road is lined with thick, towering oaks on either side, creating a barrier between the sidewalk and the road. There are two different types of rich people in their small town - the ones like Thomas who live on the outskirts, massive properties spanning god knows how far, and then the ones like Harriet.

“Alright, well - hey, come on, you can wait like one second,” he starts, eyeing her hand on the door handle as he rolls to a stop outside Harriet’s, “Be safe. Have fun. Text me whenever you’re at a new place. Let me know if any of the plans change.”

“Okay, yeah. Can I go now?”

“One more thing.”

“ _Ugh_.”

“Just one, I promise.”

“Well, out with it!”

He pauses, smiling as her knee begins to bounce up and down. Then, finally:

“I love you.”

She scoffs, rolling her eyes and throwing the door open. She stomps out dramatically, scooping her bag off the seat with a sigh. Just before she closes the door, a head pops back in.

“Love you too.”

 

It’s a relatively quiet night for Newt once he gets home from that, phone ringer left on high so that he doesn’t miss any incoming notifications - rescue calls, update texts - you know, the works.

He sits on the couch with a cup of tea for a couple hours, counting the time in messages from his sister. By nine she’s at the party safe and sound, and Newt moves to his bedroom to see if the lighting there is more conducive to him wanting to read his novel for English.

Spoiler alert, it’s not.

An hour deep into the same ten-page chapter, he resigns himself to ringing in the new year on sparknotes. His eyes still glaze over the info, but at the very least he’s absorbing the headings of each section, from which he can rip off the general ideas for his paper that’s due the first day back from the break, the one he hasn’t started yet.

A couple minutes before midnight, he switches on the radio on his bedside table so he can at least hear _someone_ counting down this year. Even just the static underneath the words is an immediate comfort, memories of Thomas lying asleep beside him flooding in. He’d liked to fall asleep with it playing softly, something that had driven Newt absolutely crazy at first, though he’d gotten so used to it by now that it was almost harder for him to sleep without it.  

_Ten._

Last year, it was him, Sonya, Harriet, Aris, Thomas, Teresa, and Minho in the living room, eating leftovers from the stew. It was as lively as their house had been in, well, _ever_ , and Newt remembers thinking that, hey, maybe he could get used to this.

_Nine._

He had been expecting Sonya and her friends to stay cooped up in her room but the reality couldn’t have been farther from his prediction - everyone hung out together, and other than an initial ten minutes or so of introductions, it wasn’t even a little bit awkward, everyone falling into an easy rapport like they’d known each other for years, a weird riff raff of a found family.

_Eight._

Everyone had brought over their own traditions, most memorable coming from Aris - each year, he’d hit shuffle on his phone as the clock struck midnight, and then the song that played would _apparently_ dictate his energy for the coming year or something.

_Seven._

He thought it was probably bullshit, but Aris definitely had hippie parents feeding him this stuff and he was nice enough so Newt went along with it anyway. Last year, the song ended up being one Newt didn’t know, this ethereal woman going on about practical ghosts doing cartwheels in graveyards or something of the sort. At the time, he couldn’t imagine how this would possibly apply to his life.

_Six._

Now, he thinks Aris just might be onto something.

_Five._

He sighs, deeply, pushing away the thoughts of last year, and he wonders:

_Four._

What if everything was different?

_Three._

What if he could go back?

_Two._

Should he have known? _Could_ he have known?

_One._

Will he ever get to hear Thomas’ voice again?

 

The clock strikes midnight.

Then, he gets the first message.


	2. pendant, i

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (none of this is how i thought it would be. i don't know how to reach you.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for this chapter and the next!
> 
> blood, descriptions of (imagined) gore, implied/referenced self harm, mild ed stuff

**To: reese murphy**

hey [1:20pm]

are you around [1:20pm]

 

**From: reese murphy**

yea [1:21pm]

 

**To: reese murphy**

can i pick you up? [1:21pm]

 

**From: reese murphy**

5 mins? [1:21pm]

 

**To: reese murphy**

kk [1:22pm]

  
  


Twelve minutes after he sends off the final text, Newt and Teresa are sitting in the parking lot of seven eleven. She holds her messenger bag - new, from Christmas, probably, made of a really nice and very real smelling brown leather - to her chest like a life preserver. His fingers curl and uncurl, cracking and popping. Words dance on the edge of his lips.

She speaks first, turning her head to rest her cheek on her arm. “You look like shit, dude.” Her voice is even enough, more so than he expected, but something about it is still volatile, as if she could break at any instant, as if each day she’d gained without Thomas was slowing sending her into a more and more fragile state, healing in reverse.

He chooses to ignore the impending sense of escalation and match her tone anyway, snorting in response, almost incredulous. “So do you,” he defends, gesturing in her general direction. 

She rolls her eyes and cracks the world’s tiniest smile. “Whatever. At least I look like I’ve slept in the past two days.” Silence, and then: “Oh my God, Newt, please tell me you’ve slept in the past two days.”

“Listen, I was going-”

“Newt!”

“No wait, listen-” he cuts himself off, realizing that in the past thirteen hours, he never once thought about how he was going to tell Teresa this and not sound like a fucking lunatic.  _ Hey, I think I heard my boyfriend/your brother that’s been missing for four months trying to talk to me last night. Yes, I’m one hundred percent sane.  _ Teresa seems to sense the shift in the air and waits patiently for Newt to gather his words. After another couple of seconds, they come spilling clumsily out in one big clump, filling the space between them.

“Okay so I actually didn’t sleep, like, two nights ago because I somehow managed to be sleeping during the day and awake at night - but that’s not important - so I stayed up so I could be sleeping normal again because Son was - anyway so I was gonna sleep last night but then, at midnight, like, like, midnight midnight I was listening to the countdown on my radio but as soon as the clock changed to today it like, cut out, and, and. I, uh. God. Fuck. I heard him, Reese.”

She blinks at him, approximately, three hundred times. Her voice is laced with the beginnings of a sob. “You - you what? Tom?”

His heart pounds in his throat. “I know it sounds completely fucking mad, but I swear to god, Teresa. It was him.”

“How? What did he - where? What? Newt, I don’t understand.”

There are tears on his face to match hers, now. It had only been thirteen hours since it happened, but it was already starting to feel too insane to be true. There he was, lying in his bed, curled up facing his clock, waiting to watch the numbers change from one year to the next. The radio announcer’s voice was much too chipper for the somber mood his night had adopted, but he’d kept the station on anyway. They counted down, all the way to one, and then -

“He was just there, all of a sudden. It was his voice, he was everywhere. I could feel him. He was there.” He feels stupid saying it, feels like he should probably be medicated, and not for the normal reasons he thinks he should be medicated. He feels like an idiot but he also feels like this is so much bigger than him and Teresa and his shitty car in this seven-eleven parking lot, and he feels like he’s going to burst.

Teresa begins to choke, words and sobs interchangeable. “What -  I don’t - did he - did he say, say something? He was  _ there _ ?”

He takes her hands and wishes that he wasn’t an awful person. “I couldn’t see him, no, but he was, I - I felt it, he was  _ there _ , he  _ was _ , I don’t know, I-” he breaks off and bites down on his tongue until he tastes blood.  _ This was a mistake. This was a mistake, and you’re traumatizing her. This doesn’t solve anything, this doesn’t bring him back, you’re- _

“Newt,” Teresa says, suddenly considerably more calm than he could have ever expected. “I need you to tell me exactly what happened.” There’s now this underlying sense of purpose in her voice - an urgent kind of focus, grave and precise - and it’s not a question so Newt takes a breath and begins to explain. He tells her how the numbers flipped to  _ 12:00am  _ and how both his phone and his laptop lit up in tandem, screens flickering from dark to bright with stuttering blocks of light resembling a broken television. He tells her how the hair on his body stood up straight and how his stomach dropped at the very particular and very distinct feeling of  _ there is someone else in this room _ and he tells her how it was Thomas’ voice that came through the radio, distorted slightly by static but still unmistakably  _ him _ , offering just two chilling words.

“ _ Find me?  _ He said, ‘find me’?” 

One minute ago, Newt would not have thought it possible for Teresa to get any paler.

(March, of the year before. Both Thomas and Teresa walking in late to homeroom, so pale they were practically translucent, glued to each other’s sides, phones and macbooks uncharacteristically absent.)

He would have been wrong.

“Yeah. Find me.” He almost sounds ashamed. He fights the urge to bury his face in his hands, away from Teresa’s intense gaze, icy blue eyes boring into him.

“Find me,” she repeats to herself quietly, finally settling back into her seat. She mumbles it a couple more times before widening her eyes in apparent realization. She blinks over at Newt for a split second, look bordering on wary as her hand hovers frozen over her bag, as if she’s about to open it up and grab something. Newt cocks his head just so slightly, a question, and she decides against whatever it was, shaking her head and squeezing her eyes shut for a second.

(Thomas, who had become worryingly notorious for needing to have his phone replaced, glitches due to internal frying.)

“What did you say about your phone?” Her hand curled around his wrist causes him to jolt back to the present, elbow knocking into the steering wheel.

“What?”

“Your phone. What happened to it?” Impatient. Annoyed, almost.

“Oh,” he says, “it just, like. glitched. Like when the screen freezes up? That.”

(Teresa, who never took notes by hand, chewing on the end of a borrowed pencil.)

“And your clock? Now? Does the radio work?”

(Thomas, who has a pile of gutted radio clocks at the bottom of his closet.)

Newt, who never said anything about the radio not working.

Teresa, who holds onto his wrist again, fingers locking around the bumpy skin. “Newt, did the radio stop working?”

He does not pull away this time.  _ How do you know that,  _ he asks, but it comes out as, “Yes.”

She releases him then, the beginnings of a tiny, hysterical laugh bubbling out of her as she brings a hand up to her face, fist resting on the bridge of glasses that Newt has not seen in a long time. He regards her as she sits completely still, a statue in his passenger seat. Her face is utterly unreadable and she seems to be completely elsewhere until finally, she lets out a sigh so deep it must come from beyond her body, beyond her tired limbs and broken heart and ocean eyes that now regard  _ Newt _ in this sad, sad way like he doesn’t know a thing. 

It is a whisper that comes from her next.

“I got them too. Glimpses.” She is faraway now, hands clasped together under her chin as if in prayer, as if she’s solved the whole damn thing. 

(Thomas, who is obsessed.)

“Of the angels?”

 

(Thomas, who is gone.)

  
  


Three days after he and Teresa’s talk in the car , Newt is stirring a pot of Butter Noodles (rotini, butter, salt, and pepper; a gourmet meal) while Teresa sits at the kitchen table, getting her hair braided by Sonya as she explains the importance of knowing how to find the slope of a line. “You’re gonna have to use it forever for everything. Like, when you have a function and-”

“Teresa, we’re not doing functions until grade eleven. We literally just do rise over run,” Sonya says, putting the finishing touches on Teresa’s braid.

She turns back, eyeing Sonya. “Then why do you need me to help you if you’ve got it all covered?”

“Hey, don’t move your head,” she chastises, weaving a couple small bunches of baby’s breath through the folds of the braid, “and this is my first high school exam, I just wanna make sure I’m extra prepared. And besides, you’re a genius, might as well exploit that as much as I can.”

“Hm, yeah.”

There’s a couple more minutes of pre-calculus and mediocre lunch preparation before the back door slides open, Minho announcing himself with arms held out wide. “He has returned!”

Newt snorts, offering nothing but a chin lifted up in his direction, though a genuine smile does bloom on his face. The girls give a sing-songy “hello,” in unison, not moving from their position at the table. 

“Do I smell butter noodles?” he asks, ditching his knapsack on the couch with little regard as he makes his way across the room to where Newt stands on the yellowing linoleum, first grabbing a stalk of baby’s breath and wordlessly sticking it through the elastic of one of Sonya’s two buns, smirking.

“Yes, and if you’d like to make yourself useful you can start chopping up the veggies for the side.” Minho does so without further tomfoolery and Newt lets himself exhale the world’s tiniest sigh. It’s the last day before school starts up again and he can’t help but feel relieved. The routine of going to school (though his attendance record this year so far is, well,  _ bad _ ) and then to work was the only thing that had held him together through the majority of first semester. The break had almost undone him, and being with all his friends for the first time since the last day of classes was a welcome change of pace. He almost,  _ almost _ , feels normal again.

He looks over at Teresa, catches her eye. She offers a small smile but swallows, knowing the secret they’re both sitting on, the one that neither of them have breathed another word of.

Yet.

  
  


When Newt’s dad disappeared, he didn’t cry for a whole two months. At first, it was the shock of it. It was genuinely such a sudden event in his life - one day there, yelling at Newt for forgetting to record his hockey game, and the next  _ gone _ \- that it felt absurd to him, like it couldn’t possibly be real. It didn’t really sink in until child protective services was called a couple days later, and their aunt from the city begrudgingly showed up at the door.

She was sick, and had been for a long time. To this day, the only rationalization he can think of for her being deemed fit to care for them is the fact that she was their only relative on the continent. Even beyond the continent, the prospects were pretty much nonexistent - his dad’s parents had died five or so years prior, and his mom (also dead) hadn’t had any family for years by the time she met Newt’s father. 

Regardless, it lasted just short of two months. Her condition worsened quickly, and without her working, the cheques from social services were barely enough to keep the lights on. At that point they still had a steady stream of casseroles coming in from the townspeople, so food wasn’t yet a problem. 

Except that it was, because Newt couldn’t look at a new dish without the paralyzing worry getting to him - how long is it going to last? Will Sonya get enough? How are they going to stretch this another week? Will their aunt need more? Are they going to be able to afford groceries on top of everything else after this runs out?

At first it was a control thing: his dad is gone and he can’t change that, but he can make sure they stay alive. He would always ration off his own portions first, smaller and smaller sections of the dish as the offerings came less and less often, leaving the rest for Sonya. He was never at a loss for excuses - she was barely twelve, she was  _ growing _ , she actually liked gym class and therefore burned more calories, she needed it more than him.

(They never tell you, how quickly the feeling of control fades and how fast it morphs into  _ I guess this is just how I am, now. _ )

Anyway: two months. That was the time it took for their aunt to be on her deathbed. Newt hadn’t yet begun asking himself what they would do if she actually  _ did _ die, and how he would avoid having him and Sonya separated in the foster system, when the questions were answered for him in the form of an apparent boyfriend appearing at their door and saying that he was going to take their aunt back to the city for a few days to get treatment. 

And, of course, they never came back.

It took a week for him to realize this. The major tip-off was his aunt’s number no longer being in service, and from that moment on it was the fear again, just waiting for social services to show up at their house. 

He supposes it was the possibility of having Sonya taken away from him that finally broke him, elbows digging into his knees on the steps of Thomas’ porch. 

“I don’t want to leave,” he said, leaving out the silent  _ you  _ that his brain automatically tacked onto the end, afterthought immediate even in the turmoil that was the current state of his life.

Thomas fiddled his fingers together, gap of space between them careful, deliberate. “I won’t let that happen,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ll figure something out. My parents will adopt you guys.”

And Newt swore, there was almost a laugh bubbling up somewhere in him at that.

“I’m serious!” Thomas said, eyes locked on Newt. His stare was almost too intense, too  _ much _ , and Newt looked away, burying his head in his hands once more, sniffling thickly. “If they come for you, we’ll adopt you and Sonya and we can all live here together and make Minho jealous as  _ hell. _ ”

He actually cracked a laugh this time, smiling for the first time in what felt like months. “He would be  _ so  _ jealous.” They shared the moment for another couple seconds, suspended softly in the space between their tear-tracked cheeks, and then Newt’s face crumpled again. “I miss him.”

Thomas knew he wasn’t talking about Minho anymore. “I know.”

Newt’s dad wasn’t an awful person or anything, but he sure as hell wasn’t a good one, either. It surprised him how much he really did  _ miss _ him, absence aching like a cold sore.

Thomas opened his mouth and then closed it again, unsure. After a second, he decided on looping one arm around Newt’s shoulder, the touch electric. 

Newt melted into it, letting his hands drop back onto his knees and resting his head on Thomas’ shoulder delicately. It was almost too much, stomach doing flips on flips at the simple touch.

“Your dad is out there, Newt. I don’t know how, but I know it. They’re gonna find him.”

And Newt didn’t know how to tell him that the police had already put the case on the back burner, trail running cold, so he just nodded and let himself believe Thomas, just if for the one night.

 

What happened next was this: he never heard from his aunt again, social services never came, and they never found his dad.

What happened after  _ that _ , was this:

  
  


It comes out when they’re all sat around the table perhaps an hour later, lunches finished and teachers complained about. There’s a moment of lull in the conversation so Newt opens his mouth and lets it come casually tumbling out like an idiot: “So, I think Thomas tried to communicate with me the other day.”

Teresa turns to him so fast she almost gives herself whiplash. Minho’s jaw goes slack, eyebrows furrowing together. Sonya’s eyes nearly bulge out of her head, and she gets the honours of first incredulous exclamation. “ _ What _ ?”

“On New Years-”

Teresa cuts him off, voice low and careful. “Newt, that wasn’t-”

“Wait, you knew?” Minho talks over her, turning now to Teresa. The table subsequently devolves into a mess of confusion and backtracking.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What the fuck?”

“Okay, if you would all just let me-”

“-that wasn’t him trying to-”

“Dude!”

“Holy fuck, guys, shut up.” They all fall silent and Newt rubs his hands down his face. It feels a lot more stupid saying it the second time around. “On New Year’s, at midnight, I, uh. I heard him, through my radio.” 

“Your  _ radio _ ?” Minho blurts it out, sarcasm in full force. Teresa opens her mouth and then shuts it again, sighing through her nose. “Dude, what?”

“Well, I-”

“It’s been four days since this happened and you didn’t even tell me? Your sister?”

_ Oh, my god.  _ Newt resists the urge to say it out loud, knowing it will only rile her up more. Sonya crosses her arms, expectant. Minho blinks, waiting, and Teresa rolls her tongue in her mouth.  _ This is not how I wanted this conversation to go. _

Minho narrows his eyes. “Weren’t you like, not sleeping that week?”

“No, he wasn’t,” Sonya answers, matter-of-factly. Newt throws his hands up in the air and looks at Teresa like,  _ help me, please _ .

Teresa tilts her head, clearly not wanting to get involved. “I’m,” she starts, hesitant, “not sure that that’s what it was, Newt.”

_ The fuck?  _ “Wait, what?”

Minho shakes his head. “Okay, what actually happened?”

“Yeah,” Sonya adds very not helpfully.

Newt groans and fantasizes about concussing himself on the table so he doesn’t have to have this conversation. Instead, he takes a deep breath. “I was sitting in my room on New Year’s eve and I was listening to the countdown on the radio and when they got to zero, all the technology in my room went all screwy - and then everything cut out and it was Thomas’ voice on the radio. He said ‘find me’,” - he looks right at Teresa when he says  _ find me _ \- “and then everything stopped.” 

Nobody speaks for a whole five seconds. And then, Minho: “It was Thomas?”

“Yes,” Newt says, and at the exact same time Teresa says, “We don’t know that.”

There is a beat that he spends just looking at her, blinking with outraged disbelief. “Excuse me?” he says, studying the suddenly flustered look that appears on her face. 

She looks quickly between Sonya and Minho, and then back to Newt once more, sighing as if to say  _ can we please not do this right now.  _ “Listen, Newt,” she starts finally, voice low, “I know what you think you heard - trust me, I  _ know _ -”

“What I  _ think  _ I heard?”

“It’s not-”

“You weren’t there, Teresa.”

And then it’s a silent standoff, the two of them caught wordlessly in the space that apparently exists between them now, Thomas lost somewhere deep in the chasm separating them. It is half stubbornness and half fear, both of them realizing what this is about to become but neither willing to back down. 

They’d always been just a little too alike. 

“You know, there’s a lot-” Teresa starts back up again and then cuts herself off, shaking her head and pressing her lips together so tightly that Newt can barely see them at all. She starts again, choosing each word very carefully. “There’s a lot that Thomas didn’t tell you about the angels.”

From the corner of his eye, he can see Minho and Sonya giving each other a very confused look, but he ignores it. There are creases of worry showing on Teresa’s forehead and her eyes widen slightly, as if mentally willing him to drop the subject. For a second he thinks that maybe Teresa actually knows something that he doesn’t, but then the feeling of certainty overwhelms him. “He was there, I felt him.”

“But where is he physically, Newt? Where is the body that houses his consciousness  located?” She’s starting to lose her patience, now, leaning forward towards him. 

“I don’t - I don’t know, but he was  _ there.  _ And besides, he said ‘find me’. Clearly, that means he-”

“Yeah, well they say a lot of things that don’t make sense, Newt.” 

“ _ They _ ?” He leans back. “This wasn’t the bloody angels, it was  _ him _ , I could feel him there with me, do you not-”

“It’s always them!” she shouts, nearly laughing, “That’s what you don’t understand, it’s always - you know what, no, I can’t do this, I’m  _ not _ doing this,” she decides, pushing away from the table and grabbing her bag with more force than necessary. There’s the slightest wobble in her chin as if she’s trying very hard not to cry, and she makes it to the hallway before spinning around once more. “You can call me when you figure it out for yourself.” 

And with that she’s at the door, tiny flowers floating to the floor as her braid spins over her shoulder. There’s a couple seconds of fumbling around, and then the door slams shut, shaking the cabinets with a low rattle.

The remaining three all look at each other, dumbfounded, like  _ what the fuck just happened _ . 

A beat passes and Minho stands. “I’ll go talk to her,” he says, softer than Newt is expecting, and follows out the front door without another word. As soon as he’s gone, Sonya turns to Newt.

“Dude.”

“I can’t believe her. I actually, truly can’t believe her,” he mutters, and Sonya raises her eyebrows. “It’s like she doesn't  _ want  _ it to be him, like she’s given up. He was  _ there _ , Sonya, I swear-”

“Newt, I believe you. You - you don’t have to try and convince me, I’m your  _ sister _ .” She says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Newt wonders how he got so lucky. He lets out a sigh and lets himself sink down to rest his chin on the table.  _ Find me. Find me. Find me. _

_ I will,  _ he promises.  _ I will.  _

  
  


When they were young, it was Teresa that got them out into the woods. 

They weren’t technically Newt’s property, but they were more his than anyone else’s, and he’d not once seen anyone through the trees from the safety of his backyard. When he was  _ really _ young, it was all about the bears.

“There are  _ bears  _ in America, Sonya,” he’d told his sister, before they’d even left England. “We’ll have to be careful.”

You can only imagine the abject horror that ensued when they found out their backyard was the exact home of the child-eating creatures.

But around third grade, once the Newt/Minho/Thomas/Teresa friendship quartet had been solid for long enough for their parents to include Newt on the playdates, the fear of bears was suddenly overcome by the sheer power of the Murphy twins.

“We need to be explorers!” Teresa had exclaimed, announcing the woods behind Newt’s house as the newest territory to be conquered (previous conquests include the tree in her and Thomas’ backyard, the big kid play structure at the park near their house, and the corn maze one of the farmers on the outskirts of town had set up for the month of October). 

And as she spoke the words into existence, a plan was set into motion. Minho’s mom and grandmother would accompany them through a boundary-pushing trek (read: a leisurely stroll) through the woods, followed by a picnic if they found a spot that was appropriate. 

It was a single file march with Thomas at the helm, their leader as always, with Teresa and the others following close behind. In the moment, Newt was still thinking about the bears - but in hindsight, it was probably that day that was the turning point for him; it was the day that he knew, somewhere in his eight year old subconscious, that he would follow Thomas anywhere.

And he has.

And he’s trying.

It’s not that easy to follow someone when they’ve vanished into thin air, but he’s trying. His treks through the woods are different now, adventurous spirit that came with the twins that got him out there in the first place fading as they have, Teresa another stark absence following the blowout in Newt’s kitchen. 

For the entire month of January she’s been gone, which is just as much her doing as it is Newt’s. He hasn’t invited her, but she also hasn’t reached out or tried to apologized for the way she reacted to it all. 

(Which was, in Newt’s opinion, terribly and without any apparent regard for the first glimmer of hope they’ve had in  _ months _ , turning her back on the idea before she even knew what it was.

He doesn’t plan on inviting her anytime soon.)

The team is now reduced to him and Minho, with the bonus addition of Sonya. They walk most afternoons after school, winding this way and that through the woods with their hands in their pockets and their eyes on the ground. It becomes a routine, the three of them walking side by side: Minho on the left, then Newt on the middle, and Sonya on the right. Sometimes they stay silent, enjoying the quiet business of the nature around them, but most of the time they’re talking, whether it’s throwing around theories about Thomas, complaining about their days at school, reminiscing about simpler times, or talking through Newt’s ongoing conflict with Teresa.

(That last one is mostly him ranting and Minho and Sonya giving each other glances they don’t think he notices. He knows that they still talk to her, and he’s fine with that, because he knows that he’s the one in the right.

Right?)

 

February comes quickly, and with it an unexpected reconciliation.

He wakes up on his seventeenth birthday relatively early, a fresh layer of snow on the ground and an empty feeling in his chest. He still hasn’t gotten around to replacing his alarm clock (in fact, he hasn’t touched it, hasn’t dared, since New Year’s) so he relies on his phone to tell him that it’s 9:48am when he drags himself out of bed and throws on a pair of sweatpants. 

There are two voices in the hall: Sonya’s definitely one of them, the other a lot quieter, muffled despite the shit-thin walls of their house. His sister is definitely doing the majority of the talking, and he can make out a couple of choice words in her chipper cadence. A minute later he hears the back door open and close, the house falling silent again, and he realizes that he’s been huddled at his door like some hermit for close to five minutes. He reminds himself that This Is His House And He Lives Here and steps out into the hall with no apprehension at all, no sir, and is promptly met with the sight of Teresa, one shoe on and the other clutched in her hand, frozen with eyes wide like she’s just been caught doing something horrible.

The two of them regard each other with great trepidation for a couple seconds before they simultaneously remember that they’re supposed to be friends and Teresa sinks, letting her shoe-holding arm go limp as she gives the saddest smile he’s ever seen. Newt leans his shoulder into the wall.

“Want some tea?” 

It’s an offer that’s met with a careful  _ sure _ and a weather-defying converse placed back onto the ground. 

He puts on the kettle in silence and prepares two mugs, standard green tea for him and some fancy french earl grey for Teresa. She peers into the mug and says a quiet “thank you,” upon seeing his (correct) choice. They stand in the kitchen together, not talking, watching the steam rise from the kettle as the water boils. 

After the water is done, he sets the filled mugs on the kitchen table and Teresa sighs audibly, pushing herself off the counter she’d been leaning on and reaching into the fridge. Newt quirks an eyebrow, taking the first sip of his tea as she sighs again, grabbing a small white box and setting it on the table in front of him. 

“Happy birthday,” she explains, voice hinted with just the slightest twinge of annoyance. She waits expectantly, not sitting down and not meeting Newt’s amused eyes.

He slides the box toward himself, examining it. “For me?” he asks, feigning surprise.

“Ugh, just-” Teresa snaps her head up finally to look at him, frustration melting from her expression when he sees him laughing. “God, Newt. This is so stupid. This is, this is so stupid. I hate this.” She drops her messenger bag and sits down all in one motion, exasperated. Her face pleads. “I hate feeling like this. I need us not to be like this.”

Newt watches the ripples in her tea, and ignores the part of his brain yelling  _ but you’ve already given up on him _ . 

Inhale. “Newt.”

Exhale. “Reese.”

“I already lost him, I can’t lose you too.”

“He’s not dead, Teresa.” It comes out quicker and sharper than Newt would have liked, and he actually sees Teresa recoil and deflate a bit before she replies, quiet and guilty.

“I know that.” It’s not very convincing. 

“Look, if there’s something you’re not telling me -” he takes a quick look behind his shoulder “-it’s just you and me, so if there’s something I need to know, about the angels, now’s the time.”

She looks to the side, eyes fixated anywhere but Newt as she takes a long, stalling sip of her tea. “It’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated about Thomas asking for us to find him?” He digs his thumbnail into the cuticle of his pinky, forcing himself to stay calm. He and Teresa had lost their tempers at each other too many times in the past month, and it was clearly getting them nowhere.

“Everything. Nothing about the way they communicate is straightforward, Newt. It’s random signs that could mean anything until you decide what it is and then it’s suddenly the opposite. Even if it seems simple you can’t trust anything they - fuck.” She shakes her leg under the table, pressing her lips together. Newt’s never seen her at this much of a loss for words; she’s the most articulate person he knows. He can tell that at this point she’s trying to hold it together and resists the urge to reach out and grab her hand. After another second she places her palms flat on the table and looks him dead in the eye.

“If it was him, talking to you, talking to you like  _ that _ , then he’s gone.” After the last word has left her mouth she crumbles back, just slightly, as if the breath’s been knocked out of her. As if that was the first time she’d said it out loud.

Newt nearly spits the words, each one its own sentence. “He’s not dead. He was there-”

“He was there! He was there! I get it, Newt,  _ I get it _ , I know what you think you felt, but-”

“What I  _ think  _ I felt?” Newt stands, chair nearly falling over behind him. Teresa startles, an infinitesimal flinch giving her away. She folds in on herself and Newt can’t help but feel a shot of disgust running through him as they start up again, already in circles. He takes his tea and dumps it in the sink.

“How old were you when your mother died?” The question catches him off guard, and he spins around to find tears in Teresa’s eyes. 

“My - my mum?” He swallows thickly, blinking down at Teresa. “What does she have - what would she have to do with  _ any  _ of this?” 

She softens a bit, the first tear finally spilling over onto her cheek. Still, she doesn’t break eye contact with Newt, and he starts to feel dizzy. Teresa repeats her question. “How old were you?”

“I was seven. Just before we all met,” he admits weakly, not liking the sudden turn of conversation. He doesn’t talk about his mom. Ever. He’s maybe brought her up around Teresa once - twice, tops. 

He waits for some sort of reply but she just squeezes her eyes tight, nodding slightly. She looks away and licks a stray tear from the corner of her lips. After an eternity, she turns back to Newt and sighs shakily. 

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s still out there. Maybe your-” she cuts off and breaks down in earnest, now, and Newt feels every ounce of animosity in him dissolve into nothing. “God, I just miss him so much,” she says through tears, violent sniffles shaking her shoulders as Newt awkwardly crouches beside her chair, holding her hands in his and willing himself not to start, because he knows that if he does, he won’t stop.

“I know, I know, me too,” he soothes, legs starting to cramp. He scoots back and perches on his own chair, tucking a stray piece of hair fallen from the braids Sonya had probably done earlier that morning behind Teresa’s ear. “So we can’t give up -  _ you  _ can’t give up. I won’t let you.” She smiles despite the tears still falling and stands, pulling Newt up with her and wrapping him in a crushing hug, sobs shaking both their bodies. 

They stand there in the kitchen, Teresa’s chin resting on the spot where Newt’s neck and shoulders meet in this hauntingly familiar way, Newt whispering promises of  _ we’ll find him  _ and trying very hard to ignore her interest in his mother.

Several minutes later, when they’ve parted and Teresa has two shoes on her feet, she lingers in the doorway. “It’s strawberry shortcake, by the way,” she says finally, fingers fiddling with the straps on her messenger bag. It takes Newt a second to realize that she means the box she’d taken from his fridge and, presumably, brought to his house before he’d woken up. 

“Oh. Thanks,” he says, knowing that she knows it’s his favourite. 

“You’re welcome,” she replies curtly, bowing ever so slightly. It’s a tiny gesture, probably not intentional or even entirely conscious, but it sends a pang of ridiculous and sudden hurt through Newt just with how  _ Thomas  _ it is. They’re twins, yeah, but jesus christ. He lets out a tiny, high pitched squeak and manages to disguise it with a cough before Teresa hesitates again, tapping her fingers against the doorframe.

“He - this is for you,” she says then, pulling a small rectangular object out of her bag and stepping toward Newt all in one quick, fluid motion. At the end of her outstretched arm, shaking slightly, is a leather bound book, worn and warped as if it had been used for some time. 

He takes it from her, the world moving in slow motion.

“He’s been working on it for like, ever, and he told me last Summer that it was going to be a birthday present for you once he finished it,” Teresa explains, wringing her hands together. “He, uh, I don’t think it’s finished yet, but. Ha.” She gives a small, humourless laugh and Newt meets her eyes, unable to speak. The book burns in his hands. “I never read it,” she assures then, “I, I kept it. I was gonna give it to you before, but I. I don’t know. It’s - happy birthday, Newt.”

She gives him one last tiny, sad smile and leaves him alone in his house on an un-turning Earth. 

  
  


Things start to look up as much as they can. Teresa starts sitting with Newt and Minho at lunch again, and slowly starts to return to something resembling her old self. There’s still a bit of a wall between her and everyone else, but at least it’s not a wall, a moat, and a fully armed set of guards taking form as glared daggers and pointy words. Now, the majority of her venom is laced with love.

It’s a start, is what it is.

They settle into the new semester. Newt picks up an extra shift at the library - Tuesday nights, right after school until close. It’s generally quiet, leaving him ample time to himself and his thoughts. He’s never sure if that’s a good thing or not. 

An hour into his shift, a familiar voice questions, “Isn’t it a little early in the week to be having a spiritual awakening?” 

Newt grins, blowing air out of his nose in something resembling a laugh. “Definitely,” he agrees, marking his place in the thick book and looking up to see Mary, a single eyebrow raised in mock suspicion. “Don’t worry, just a little bit of research.”

And while he’s not technically lying to her, he’s also not making any moves to clarify why in god’s name the actual, literal  _ Bible _ could be of any academic or personal use to a decidedly agnostic seventeen year old boy. Though he’s actually quite sure that Mary would gladly spend the rest of their shift together being a soundboard for Newt to ramble about every Christian angel mentioned by name in the first 265 pages of the Bible - probably even more so than Sonya or Minho, for that matter - he’s not about to drag her into another personal crisis.

She’s not stupid, and Newt knows that. The whole town knows what happened to Thomas. Well, actually, no one  _ knows  _ what happened to Thomas but they know he’s very publicly missing. When it had happened, Mary had been one of the first to volunteer to organize the search parties. At the first one, she’d pulled Newt aside and told him to take as much time as he needed before coming back to work.

She knows Thomas had a thing for angels, and had spent many a Wednesday night chatting with him about whatever particular piece of research for the last hour of Newt’s shift whenever he came to pick him up. Newt would have to be pretty dense to think she didn’t recognize every book he had spend his shifts cradling for the past two months.

But true to her nature, she doesn’t pry. That’s one of the things Newt likes most about her - even from the start, back when his dad disappeared and he and Sonya’s life was spiralling down the drain, she treated him like a person, not a tragedy. Even with the bags under his eyes, the tremor in his hands, and the notebook full of gibberish scrawled out beside him, all he gets is a watchful glance caught in his peripherals every so often and the occasional pointed look that says something along the lines of,  _ I know you’re not going to tell me, but I’m here if you change your mind. _

And Newt could deal with that.

  
  


(Three weeks and four days after his dad disappeared, Newt found himself in the library without really knowing how he’d ended up there. It was empty, save for Mary at the desk. 

“Newt,” she’d said, an almost imperceptible hint of breathless surprise in her voice. A moment of softness, and then, with great determination: “Come over here.”

“I see you and your friends in here all the time. You’re always reshelving everything they grab - and quite well, I might add. Might as well get paid for it.” 

It was a lifeline, one that snapped Newt back into that moment. His breath caught in his throat and stayed there as he realized the weight of the woman’s words.  _ Might as well get paid for it _ . A job. She was offering him  _ survival _ . There was the vague feeling of a weak nod, Newt’s head bouncing up and down as shocked tears ran down his face. He could see her hesitating, debating internally if it was her place to reach out and comfort him, so he took a few gasping breaths and said the first thing that came to mind.

“I know the dewey decimal system.”)

  
  


It’s a snowy Saturday morning when he is leant over his notebook, revising his latest list. It’s a collection of similar cases to Thomas’ - all sudden disappearances with no apparent motive or reason to leave and no suspects for abduction. It’s the result of another 3:00am burst of motivation, but now, at 9:00am, he’s paying for it. The words swim on the page and his mind wanders elsewhere. 

“Whatcha workin’ on?” Sonya asks, math textbook cradled in her arm as she waltzes barefoot into the kitchen.

“Just looking at some cases,” he says, trailing off. Then, he gets an idea. “Actually, do you want to come on a walk with me?”

She looks apprehensive, raising an eyebrow at Newt’s sudden perkiness. “Sure,” she says anyway. 

“Alright, grab your coat.”

Ten minutes later they’re trudging through the backyard, snow halfway up their shins. Newt suspects that Sonya is seriously regretting agreeing to this, but he knows that it won’t be so bad once they get out of the open and into the forest where there’s more cover overhead. 

When he estimates them to be about two minutes away, (accounting for added snow travelling time) he starts explaining it. “So, our working theory right now is that it’s something to do with the angels, right? Thomas has said that he’s heard them since he was little, but he only started getting really really into it when we were about twelve. When we found - when we found  _ this _ .”

All of a sudden the trees break, spindly, bare branches giving way to the clearing -  _ their  _ clearing. And of course, as imposing as ever, the statue. It stands tall, a thick blanket of snow resting over its surface. 

Sonya looks up in awe. “Has this been in our backyard  _ the whole time _ ?” She turns to Newt, cheeks red from the cold and jaw hanging wide open. 

He smiles. “That’s exactly what I said.”

“Jesus.” Sonya inches closer the the angel, as gracefully as one can in snow nearly a foot deep. Newt winces just a little bit as she reaches a hand up, though she’s careful not to actually touch it. “So, you guys found him when you were twelve?”

It’s deeply unsettling to hear Sonya call the angel a he - it feels incredibly personal, almost bordering on sacrilegious, in some awful, underlying way. He and Thomas had always just used ‘it’ to refer to the angel. Now this just feels very wrong.

Sonya raises her eyebrows expectantly and Newt snaps out of it, shaking his head. “Yeah. Yeah, he brought me here when we were twelve. That’s when he started getting - getting, uh-”

“Less cute interest and more scary fixation?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. I never said anything, but, like. He was  _ really _ ,  _ really  _ into that shit.”

Newt isn’t sure what to do with that just yet, so he ignores it. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking that this-” he gestures to the statue, “-might be the key.”

“And why is that?”

It’s not that Newt doesn’t want to tell her, or doesn’t trust her - hell, he’d brought her here with the intent  _ to  _ tell her - but now when he’s met with the task, it almost feels wrong, in a way. The same kind of wrong he felt when Sonya had called the statue a he, just now - like there is something ancient deep within him that wants to come out and snap,  _ no, this is mine.  _

But then he shakes himself out of it, weird feeling passing as quick as it had come on. He explains, giving Sonya a quick “hear me out, alright?” as he recounts the last time he and Thomas went to the clearing together, as clear as if it was yesterday.

 

It happened four days before Thomas disappeared.

“You think anyone else knows about this place?” Thomas was sitting in front of the statue, sketching a close-up of the scales, when Newt asked the question. 

He hummed thoughtfully, added a couple more lines to his drawing, then set his pencil down on the paper. “I’m not sure.” Not once, in all their four years of going there, had they seen another human being.

Newt sat down beside him and sighed quietly, watching Thomas, back to drawing, from the corner of his eye. He waited for him say something about the angel protecting them or their spot or something equally as endearing-yet-slightly-worrying. It wasn’t like Newt was worried that Thomas was suddenly gonna drop and start worshipping satan all of a sudden, (who was actually an angel originally, as he had been informed) but he was reaching a point that was, well. Probably not good. He wasn’t so much as hurtling toward the realm of unhealthy obsession as he had been inching his way there over the years. 

Newt would say that he was quietly worried.

He sighed again, somewhere between boredom and content. It was a hotter summer than they’d had in past years, so he was grateful for the shade of the trees above. His and Thomas’ knees pressed together, both of them cross-legged on the grass. 

He reached up to touch the statue, the angel’s left hand lowered with the weight of the scale. It’s fingers curled around the lever loosely, and it looked like with a bit of maneuvering it could be wiggled free from the angel’s grip, its own independent piece of stonework. Newt rested his hand on that of the angel, fingers tracing the groove between its pinkie and ring finger. He closed his eyes. There was a certain sense of calm blanketed over the forest, an added weight to the air that felt-

“Hey, have you ever-” Thomas voice snapped Newt out of his trance, then stopped abruptly as Newt gasped, jerked back to this dimension. He opened his mouth again but closed it when his eyes landed on Newt’s hand, white knuckled.

Inside of it: three fingers, made of chalky stone. The scale tipped in the angel’s then deformed hand, and the look of absolute urgency in Thomas’ eyes was a punch to Newt’s gut.

The world was silent for three entire seconds. 

He choked out a quiet “Oh my god,” and Thomas sat there, blinking about eighty times within the span of those three words. The statue looked down at them, disapproving. 

“It’s fine,” Thomas decided then, sounding very far from fine. “It’s fine.” He repeated it a few more times, eyes darting between Newt’s hand and the angel’s. 

Newt didn’t speak, but slowly took the fingers and put them onto the tray of the scale, attempting to balance it as it had been. Thomas let out a small, tiny sigh.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that? It’s fine, Newt, don’t even worry about it. It’s fine.”

 

(It is most certainly not fine.)

 

When he is finished, Sonya looks a lot less skeptical than Newt was expecting. “Oh, now that’s  _ interesting _ ,” she says, “You’re telling me that - that you and Thomas used to come here to hang around this angel state he was weirdly obsessed with - which, yes, by the way, you’re definitely not being paranoid or making that all up because even Teresa’s told me that  _ she  _ thought it was getting out of hand - and so you accidentally break part of it and then he gets all spooked and disappears less than a week later? Newt, that has to be something.”

“You really think so?” He realizes then that there has been a lot of self-doubt lingering under the surface, like everything he’d been doing and working towards for the past five months was followed by a little footnote reading something like,  _ but you might just be crazy, so.  _ Hearing Sonya agree wholeheartedly with his theories makes him feel, dare he say, valid. 

“Uh,  _ yeah _ ,” she says, making a face like  _ obviously, dummy.  _

Newt smiles to himself, just a little bit. “Okay.”

“Okay, so have you balanced the scales yet?” She asks it as if anyone could see that that’s obviously the logical next step. 

“I tried - I put the broken off part onto the other side so it would balance, but then…” he trails off, going back up into his thoughts. When he was there that day with Thomas, the scales  _ had _ balanced out with the weight of the two fingers. But when he’d gone back the next time - it couldn’t have been later than the day after Thomas disappeared - the fingers were gone and the scales had tipped again, all the way over to the opposite side. Now, even under the weight of the snow, they remain in that position.

Unbalanced.

“Holy shit.”

“What?”

He says it like a revelation. “I think we have to balance the scales.”

Sonya blinks the snowflakes off her eyelashes. “Oh, well yeah. I thought that part was pretty obvious.” She tilts her head at him as he frowns. “Like, y’know. You take something from them, they take something from you. Like, cosmically, we have to restore balance for things to be normal again. Conservation of energy? Oh - come  _ on _ , I know you have to know that, even  _ I  _ remember Thomas never shutting up about the laws of thermodynamics.”

Newt just stares at her. “You are. You’re-”

“Newt, are you telling me you not  _ once  _ thought that maybe you have to balance the scales?”

“ _ No _ ,” he answers, incredulous.

Sonya just shrugs. “Well, I think that’s probably a good place to start.” She squats down in the snow, gently brushing off the surface of the two scales so their surfaces are exposed. “Where do you think the fingers went?” she muses, studying the jagged edges of the stone. 

“Actually, I have no idea.” One day they were there, and the next, they were gone. There’s a lot of possible explanations for this that are much more reasonable than “the angels did it”, but nothing about this situation has been reasonable so far, so why start now?

Sonya takes the words directly from Newt’s brain. “Oh, they’re angry.” It’s like she can sense his surprised stare on her back, because she turns around and begins to elaborate. “Look, I’m not saying I really believe in all of this, but if this is what we’re running with, I’m gonna run with it.” She pauses, sighing as she stands up and dusts the snow from her knees. “You broke his fingers, so he took Thomas, even though you put them back. So they’re angry - they want more in return for what you did. We have to do something else.” She pauses and it’s like she can  _ see  _ the gears turning in Newt’s head. “And -  _ no,  _ I don’t mean like a sacrifice. We are not getting into - we are not making any  _ sacrifices _ , Newt.”

He just hums, pushing away the thought of how much it would cost to get his hands on a lamb. “Alright, alright,” he says. He watches her roll her eyes and exhale in a puff of white, and makes a mental note that she hadn’t put it past him to go straight to ritualistic sacrifices. “But this is something, right?”

Sonya smiles then, and for the first time in months, Newt feels like he isn’t flailing.

“Definitely.”

  
  


Almost three years ago, Sonya had her first harvest. 

She’d gotten the greenhouse overturned in just three days, planting rows upon rows of cauliflower, brussel sprouts, broccoli, and cabbage. Still muddling through the shock of his dad’s sudden disappearance and needing something to use as a distraction, Newt was cautiously optimistic that Sonya’s little gardening project would pull through. He even liked three out of four of the vegetables she’d chosen.

But when it rains, it pours, so the only plant that had actually taken root and bloomed was the cabbage. 

For the next two months following that first harvest, Newt’s life was little more than cabbage and chaos. In a way, cabbage was kind of a constant in the rapidly changing mess that had become his life, always waiting there for him at the end of the day, in some form or another. 

It was also, truly, the bane of his existence.

There was cabbage rolls, cabbage slaw, shredded cabbage, cabbage stir fry, cabbage stew, cabbage soup, (yes, those two are distinct meals that both suck) and just straight-up cabbage. They had somehow accumulated enough cabbage to have at least three tupperwares of cabbage-themed leftovers in the fridge at any given time, just sitting there and taunting him.

Don’t get him wrong, Newt was - and still is - incredibly proud of Sonya for pulling both her and Newt up by the metaphorical bootstraps as quickly and forcefully as she did. He knows that she probably saved their lives by being as resourceful as she was. She was the younger one, but she was always the more responsible one.

So yeah, he loved her to the end of the world and beyond, even when  _ their  _ world seemed to be ending - but he did not love cabbage. 

If he had to give one thing to cabbage, it would be this: after the third night in a row of the second iteration of cabbage stew, Newt got so fed up with it all that he finally started accepting the Pity Meals. You know, the ones that random townspeople you only vaguely recognize awkwardly shove into your arms when they appear on your doorstep at any hour they so please? And it’s not like they can say anything like “ _ I’m so sorry for your loss”  _ because their dad didn’t  _ die _ , he just vanished completely. It made casseroles a little bit harder to dish out, and a little bit easier for Newt to refuse.

(Before the cabbage, of course.)

On one of the first days mild days of the season that year, Newt and Thomas biked laps around the town. They spent an hour in semi-comfortable silence, letting the wind raise goosebumps over their exposed arms. When they had enough, they rolled into Newt’s backyard and ditched their bikes at the back door. Sonya appeared at the same moment, coming out of the greenhouse, milk crate overflowing with, of course, cabbages, in her tiny arms.

“Hey, Sonya,” Thomas greeted cheerily.

“Thomas! Hi!” 

“Sure got a lot of lettuce there.”

“It’s cabbage,” Newt and Sonya both said at the same time, tones contrasting wildly. Newt fought the urge to roll his eyes. He’d already been having a not great day. Going for a ride with Thomas had helped some, but the very sight of another crop of that godforsaken vegetable was enough to spoil his mood again.

“She should start a bloody  _ business  _ we have so much,” Newt said, completely as a joke, but then Thomas turned to him with that look in his eyes, the one Newt had been seeing more and more of lately that he couldn’t quite name - but he knew that he really, really liked it.

“That’s a great idea,” Thomas said, already fumbling in his pocket for his wallet. Newt had always found it a bit strange that Thomas carried around a wallet with him everywhere, as if he had a drivers license or whatever else people keep in wallets that aren’t money. But, despite the fact that he was a fourteen year old boy with no income, Thomas produced a crisp ten dollar bill from the leather folds and shoved it haphazardly in between two of Sonya’s fingers, still clutching onto the crate. “Would you pick me your finest cabbage, please?”

There was a very strange dichotomy of feelings that surged separately through Newt at that moment: on one side, there was the overwhelming bursting of his heart, filled with gratitude and pride and adoration for his friend’s simple, easy selflessness.

(He did not yet know, but he would later come to call that  _ love _ .)

But then, on the other side, the one that came wholly unexpected: the unmistakable twinge of bitterness, and the slightest hint of contempt.

(This one, he would grapple with for years to come.)

 

But, despite the split-screen of his feelings, this is how their real salvation began.

  
  


The next day, there are four teenagers walking through the snow in a single file line. A complaint is hurled from the back of the line, all the way to the front. 

“My feet are  _ soaked _ .”

“You’re the one that chose to wear running shoes, Minho.”

“I didn’t know we’d be trekking to the fucking  _ North Pole,  _ Newt _. _ ”

“Hm,” Teresa hums between the two of them, holding up a finger as she takes out her phone. “Yeah, no, Min. Newt said in his text that we’d be walking in the snow in the woods, so.” There is a triumphant smile that Newt can’t see but knows is there, followed by a Minho sounding huff.

“Whatever.”

Sonya pipes in quietly. “Also, we’re actually going South right now, so.”

“ _ Whatever. _ ”

Newt allows himself a small, inward chuckle, but it doesn’t do much to quell his oncoming nerves. Things were patched up with Teresa - precariously, but they were patched up. She was enthusiastic to come out on this excursion. Though, Newt may have been slightly misleading with that: he hadn’t explicitly said it was a Thomas Investigation themed excursion, just that he wanted to show them something out in the woods. That merited enough pause on its own that it would be assumed to have to do with Thomas stuff, right?

He knows that that’s probably not right, but it’s what he lets himself think as they trudge through the snow, slightly more packed down from his and Sonya’s pilgrimage the day earlier. The feeling that this was a bad idea intensifies with each step he takes, spreading down to his fingertips. Teresa probably would have liked to have a little warning. And besides, the statue was his and Thomas’ - it was  _ theirs.  _

He’s not sure why this protective instinct is kicking in again, but he doesn’t have time to really think about it in that moment because all of a sudden they’re there.

“This is it,” he says, maneuvering around in the snow to face the group. Their faces are like a condensed spectrum of human emotion, Sonya and Minho bookending it with a supportive smile and annoyed scowl, respectively, then Teresa in the middle with the most eerily neutral expression Newt’s ever seen. He continues. “Thomas and I found this place back in grade seven - ever since then he’s been obsessed with it, so I thought maybe it could be a clue.”

Minho is the first to break, discontent dropping off his face at the mention of Thomas’ name. Sonya shivers slightly and Teresa blinks, stepping around Newt to approach the statue silently. 

There’s a heavy quiet hanging in the air that Newt scrambles to fill. “We, uh, we came here a couple of, uhm. A couple days before it happened.”

At this Teresa turns to face him, eyes wide and almost accusatory. She opens her mouth as if she’s about to say something but instead she faces the statue again, a quiet realization falling from her lips in the form of a low gasp.

“It’s him.”

Newt can’t even get a word out before she places her hand in the crook of the angel’s elbow, immediately going rigid, breath catching in her throat with an awful choking sound. The world speeds up and Minho and Sonya are rushing forward, Newt left frozen in his spot watching Teresa’s eyes roll back into her head, eyelids fluttering open and closed.

“What do you mean  _ it’s him _ ?” he hears himself ask, voice somehow exiting his body even though there is no air in his lungs to propel it out. Sonya takes a whole second to turn around and shoot him a disgusted look before turning back to Teresa, hand on the back of her neck to support her head. Her shoulders start to shake violently and Minho pries her fingers from the statue, one by one. 

Newt can’t will any part of his body to move. He stands by watching as she convulses, the sound almost too much to bear. Ten seconds ago she was  _ fine.  _ His earlier question repeats in his mind like a drum, back of his tongue itching to form it again.  _ What does she mean? Who is  _ him _?  _ Does she mean the statue, or-

There is a pained gasp, and then Teresa, Minho, and Sonya are flying backwards into the snow. The moment is like a tableau: the three of them huddled on the ground, wounded, and the angel’s sword raised high above its head, about to strike. 

And Newt, still doing nothing.

“Teresa?” Sonya gasps, pulling a strand of hair out of her mouth. Everyone spends a moment in horrified suspension before she inhales sharply, eyes bursting open. Sonya and Minho let out tandem sobs, and Newt starts to feel himself regaining control of his limbs. Her eyes are as wide as he’s ever seen them, darting around panickedly. Sonya helps her sit up and her breathing eventually slows. 

Minho is the first to ask the question on everyone’s lips. “What happened?” 

She looks at him like she’s just realizing he’s there on the ground with her, and shakes her head. Her lips move, but no sound comes out. 

“Teresa,” Newt starts, voice harder than he’d intended.

“Newt, don’t,” Sonya spits quietly, malice knocking him off guard. He shuts his mouth promptly. 

Minho takes a gentler approach this time. “Can you stand?” She nods and they get her to her feet, only a little unsteady. 

She doesn’t meet Newt’s gaze as she speaks, voice hoarse. “Take me home.”

No one says anything for the entire trip back, stunned into mutual silence. Minho holds and arm around Teresa’s shoulders as they walk, guiding her carefully through the snow. Sonya walks behind them, short puffs of cold, cloudy air leaving her mouth as she curls and uncurls her fists. Newt holds up the end of the line, barely aware of where his feet land as his thoughts consume him once more.

It’s almost unbearable how much he needs to know what Teresa was talking about before she completely wigged out. It was almost like she  _ recognized  _ the statue. But it didn’t seem like she’d been there before, so how could she have known what it looked like? They’d never explicitly talked about it, but it was always implied that his and Thomas’ special place was theirs and theirs alone. They’d never even mentioned it to the others in passing. 

And yet, there’s something Teresa knows about it that Newt apparently doesn’t.  _ It’s him.  _ He feels that odd surge of protectiveness coming on again - it feels wrong for Teresa to know anything about the statue. He starts to think that taking them all here - even Sonya, even on their own - was a big mistake. 

He tries not to think about what it will cost him. 

 

Later that night, Sonya claims to have a headache. There’s a small part of Newt that thinks she’s just saying that because she’s still mad at him for earlier, but he makes the walk over a few blocks to the seven eleven to get her some advil anyway. Even if he actually suspected she was lying, he’d do it anyway. It only takes him a couple minutes for his cheeks to go numb, and by the time he reaches the familiar neon beacon of convenience, Newt is considering buying a pair of gloves for the way home. 

He walks slowly up and down the aisles as he defrosts, pulling a pair of the world’s thinnest gloves off the rack. After that he grabs a travel sized bottle of advil, then spends a couple of minutes blankly staring into the shelf of candy. When he was younger, the sour candies were always his and Sonya’s favourite. He remembers begging every single time for his dad to let them get a pack, and every single time it was a stern  _ no _ . Newt would spend the rest of the day pouting, arms crossed and huffing angry sighs every other minute like the utterly petulant child he was. 

And maybe there’s still a little bit of that petty little brat left in him, because Newt grabs the candy in a silent  _ fuck you, dad,  _ and triumphantly marches up to the register, dropping the gloves back on their rack on the way up. He sets his candy and his advil down on the counter and waits for the cashier to start scanning. 

It’s the one he likes, simply for the reason that he doesn’t bother trying to make small talk whenever Newt comes in. He hands Newt his bag with some sort of grunt, and then he’s back out into the cold, heading home. 

The moon hangs eerily low on the horizon, a thin haze of clouds partially obscuring its light. The neon glow of the sign behind him grows fainter with each step, but the snow beneath his feet is still coloured a bright, unnatural orange. The air is still, oddly so - when he’d walked to the store, there was a wind turning his forehead to a slab of ice. He stops for a second, listening to the silence of the town, peeling a hand from out of his pocket to feel for any sort of breeze, and then his phone begins to vibrate from inside his jacket.

He tries not to let it feel monumental, mumbling something to himself about Sonya worried about him taking too long as he fumbles with the zipper. It’s still vibrating, which means it’s definitely a call, unless Sonya has finally perfected her Phone Call Fake Out Perfectly Spaced Text Messages bit that she became briefly obsessed with back when she got her first phone.

However, it is not Sonya but an unknown number, green  _ accept call  _ button waiting expectantly on the screen. It takes him a few tries because of the cold, but he eventually manages to press it and slowly raises the phone up to his ear, still standing frozen in the middle of the road. The silence in the air around him somehow grows thicker, encasing him in a pocket of the universe completely severed from everything else as the sound of breathing hits his ears. 

On the other end of the line: somewhere else, somewhere very far away, somewhere that is nowhere and everywhere all at once - Thomas delivers his second message.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can save her.”

And then the line goes dead.

Time grinds to a halt, but Newt’s mind is propelled forwards like a bullet from a gun. The voice was him, there is no mistaking that. But it sounded thin, like he was straining to speak.  _ I don’t think I can save her.  _ The first  _ her  _ that comes to mind is Sonya, and for a moment his heart stops beating. There is the overwhelming instinct to run home, to make sure she is safe, but then it passes as quickly as it came on.  _ That doesn’t make sense.  _ Sonya is fine. Sonya has  _ been  _ fine. But.

Teresa has not been fine. Teresa was not fine this morning.

Teresa is not fine.

And Thomas doesn’t think he can save her? 

Something about it doesn’t seem quite right, like there’s some crucial information that Newt is missing here. A voice in the back of his head reminds him that there’s barely any information he’s  _ not  _ missing. A sudden wave of longing reverberates through Newt’s body, shooting down his spine like the Winter chill. 

There are rarely moments where Newt is not thinking about Thomas. However, there are stretches of time where Newt is thinking so much about finding Thomas that he forgets, momentarily, exactly to the extent he  _ misses  _ him. Hearing his voice brings him right out of that, though, ache in his chest back to the forefront of his awareness.  _ I’m sorry.  _ It sounded nothing like any apology Newt’s heard from him before - not light and laced with laughter, accompanied with a shit-eating grin, nor soft and earnest, whispered as much through the touch of his fingers as his lips. No, this was different. This was new. This was almost pleading, like he was afraid Newt would be mad, or he was afraid for his  _ own  _ life. It’s not like anything he’s ever heard come out of Thomas’ mouth and it almost brings him to his knees right then and there in the middle of the street.

And yet, he’d give anything to hear it again, just to listen to his voice one more time.

 

(Later, at home, after he’s set the bag of advil and candy on the floor in front of Sonya’s door without a word, he crawls into his bed and spends the entire night scrolling through his videos, tearing his heart open a little bit more every time Thomas’ laugh fills his room.)

 

The next morning in homeroom, Minho’s history of having no regard whatsoever for tact strikes once again.

“You guys really shouldn’t ignore the group chat, I sent some good dog videos last night.” He lets his books fall onto the table with a loud  _ slap _ , setting off a ringing in Newt’s ear. Teresa rolls her eyes half-heartedly from behind Minho, stepping around him to get to her own seat. She looks paler than normal. Newt is torn between wanting to comment on that and wanting to give Minho a glare with something along the lines of  _ we didn’t check the group chat because Teresa was briefly possessed yesterday, Minho _ , but neither of those seem like great ideas so he decides to keep sitting in silence.

Minho continues on once its evident that no one is planning any profuse apologies. He is either completely unaware of the tension across the table, or he doesn’t give a shit.

(Or, it is possible that he is  _ hyper _ aware, and this is just his way of trying to help. Regardless, Newt doesn’t quite have the energy for it, today.)

“Really. At least  _ Sonya  _ appreciates my contributions. I might have to give her the honour of being  _ Minho’s Favourite  _ this week.”

As soon as it’s out of his mouth, his face falls. Teresa pales even further, if that’s possible. Newt blinks. They have not done  _ Minho’s Favourite  _ in a long time. 

_ Minho’s Favourite  _ is a tradition they’d had ever since facebook started letting people change their names in group chats - every week, Minho would crown a new member of the group to have their nickname be changed to  _ Minho’s Favourite _ . It started out as a joke - the details are fuzzy, but essentially Newt was the only one to side with Minho on a stupid argument, so he was the favourite. There was a short period of very tough competition for the title where Newt, Thomas, and Teresa would do outrageous things to try and win his blessings. Most of the time he gave it to himself to annoy them. In more recent years it was an arbitrary, random assignment, usually given to whoever Minho felt like that particular week.

Thomas was the last person awarded the title of  _ Minho’s Favourite. _

“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that,” he says quietly, staring down at the table. 

The nicknames, and that particular group chat, had remained virtually untouched since last Summer. It was actually Newt who made their new one, back in September as a ways to coordinate rides between the four of them for one of the earlier search parties. From then on it had just become their group chat for daily use. Newt’s not sure what would have felt worse: seeing Thomas’ profile picture on the side of his screen every day, the last message he read never changing, or actively creating a new group chat for just the three of them and thereby acknowledging that Thomas wasn’t a part of their thing anymore, essentially giving up hope that he would ever come back. However narrowly they’d avoided that with their current group chat situation, it still feels awful. Every possible option is awful.

And it’s not like Newt doesn’t already go back and open their old chat twice a week anyway, tapping on the tiny bubble with Thomas’ face to see when he read the last message.  _ August 1st, 2014. 2:06pm.  _ It’s ingrained into him already; he doesn’t need to check.

But he does, anyway. Just in case.

He’s not sure how much time has passed when he crawls out of his brain and reenters the world, but it can’t be long because Teresa is only just now comforting Minho. “It’s alright, Min. I’m sorry, my phone got fried last night. But I’ll watch it now if you wanna show me on your phone.” He gives her a weak smile and pulls out his phone, opening messenger.

It takes Newt a full second to register exactly what she’s said before he replies, “Me too.” Minho doesn’t look up but Teresa’s eyes go dark, darting up to meet Newt’s with quiet urgency. They stare at each other for a long three seconds and simultaneously realize:  _ they both got the message. _

There is no time to speculate specifics because then Minho is turning up the volume on his phone and a tiny black pomeranian is beginning to cry every time a man tries to leave a house. Teresa blinks and just like that her face is back to normal, no acute, earth-shattering realizations in sight. She leans her chin onto Minho’s shoulder, smiling softly at the dog on the screen. He’s not sure how she does it, switching back into an unassuming demeanor in a moment’s notice. Newt can barely hear the Australian man telling the dog that he  _ has to leave now _ because there are a million new questions flying through his mind, blocking out everything else. 

He almost goes to ask her about it again when the bell signalling the end of homeroom rings, but her eyes snap to him faster than he can open his mouth, shutting him up before he even says a word. The class gathers their things, and once Minho jets out to get to his next class, she pulls Newt aside and lowers her voice. 

“Let me see your phone,” she says, and he only hesitates for a second before reaching into his pocket and handing it over. She fiddles with it for just a second, pressing all the buttons a couple of times and finally sighing once it doesn’t turn on. She closes her eyes, takes a breath, and then: “I’m gonna take this.”

“Excuse me?”

Another sigh, less patient. “I can - fuck, Newt. I can… fix it. Please don’t ask me how.”

Past mornings flash through his mind, Teresa and Thomas coming in with twin tales of dropping their phones in the pool. The pile of clock radios in Thomas’ closet, and Newt’s own, still sitting on his bedside table. 

Then Newt has another thought, and his tone is suddenly indignant. “I’m not letting you buy me a phone, Teresa.”

She presses her lips together tightly, as if talking to a particularly difficult child. “I said I would  _ fix  _ them, Newt, not replace them.” He looks down at her hands - clutching both their phones - and notices the chip in the corner of her screen, the one from that time they went hiking two Summers ago and it popped out of her pocket. 

Which happened well before the last three Murphy twins tandem phone mishaps. 

He blinks. “Fix them?” He’d always assumed that they’d just replaced their phones whenever they wrecked them, as people with as absurd amounts of money as their family usually did.

She closes her eyes again. “I said please don’t ask.”

It is in this moment that Newt notices once again how run-down she looks. The dark circles under her eyes, and the dry flakes of skin peeling off of her cheeks. She looks gaunt - sunken in - and he wonders if she’s just still recovering from the episode yesterday, or if maybe he hasn’t been paying enough attention lately. He wants to push, to ask her how, to yell at her for  _ still  _ being secretive with him, after everything. 

But instead: “Alright.”

At that she deflates, shoulders once upon a time held wide and proud now collapsing in on themselves. She cradles their phones to her chest. “I’ll bring it back tomorrow,” she says, and then looks at Newt, takes a breath, and turns on her heel toward the door without another word.  He doesn’t follow, standing there for a minute, unmoving as students from the first period class start to trickle in and take their seats. 

Thomas doesn’t think he can save her. Newt’s not so sure it’s up to any of them, anyway.

 

That afternoon after school, a lack of dairy products leads to Newt accidentally telling Sonya about the second message.

“You get my text about the milk?” 

He tries to play dumb at first. “Milk?”

“Yeah, you finished it this morning so I texted you around second period reminding you to pick some up if you went home during your spare?”

“Hm.” It’s an inadequate response, and once she raises an eyebrow he knows he’s caught. “Yeah, I kind of fried my phone last night.” It’s not like he was deliberately hiding it from her - he was just hoping he’d have more time before he had to actually address the fact that it happened.

“You fried your - holy shit, was it him again?”

Newt sighs deeply. “Yeah, it was.”

“Are you alright?” Sonya is frowning, looking him up and down with concern. He rolls his weight from side to side.

“‘M’fine,” he lies.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

He considers. “Not really,” he answers honestly, chest feeling a lot tighter than it had a second ago. Last night had taken more out of him than he’d realized. And the two-hour trip down memory lane probably hadn’t helped matters, either. It feels like he’s walked into a brick wall - the sadness hitting him all at once, any momentum he’d had going for his research stomped down into a tiny, pathetic mound of  _ maybe later.  _

“Okay,” Sonya says, distracting him from the sudden urge to cry. “That’s okay.” The two of them stand in uneasy silence for a moment, Newt turning down the hall toward his room and then, “So what about your phone?”

There’s that tone in her voice, the careful one like she’s trying not to sound scared. Newt can sniff it out every single time - they both know that they cannot afford a new phone. 

“Teresa has it.”

“Teresa?”

“Yeah, she said she could fix it.” When he sees Sonya’s face, he adds, “I didn’t ask.”

“You  _ didn’t ask? _ ”

He sighs, leaning against the wall. “I don’t think I want to know.” He knows it’s a lie as soon as he says it, but he is too tired to wrestle with his thoughts at this moment.

Sonya furrows her eyebrows, opening and closing her mouth a few times. “So, what, is she like, gonna  _ buy- _ ”

“No, no,” Newt cuts her off, “nothing like that. She - she and Thomas, they’ve…” he trails off, wondering how to best explain to his baby sister that his missing boyfriend and his twin sister are actually quite experienced in the field of having divine beings hijack and subsequently ruin their technology. 

“Hey,” she interjects, stopping the gears from spinning out in his head. It’s clear that she wants to know, but lets him off the hook anyway. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“It’s okay,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m just - later?”

She nods her head and gives him a small smile, somewhat awkwardly and only slightly dejectedly retreating back into the kitchen, putting the kettle on to boil. “Tea?”

He feels as if there is nothing left in him, a crumbling shell. He wants to sleep for a week. “No thanks, I think I’m going to go take a nap.”

He wakes up around midnight, thoroughly disgruntled, and stumbles into the kitchen for a glass of water. When he arrives in the shadow-framed squares of moonlight, he finds a brand new carton of milk in the fridge and a notepad on the counter. 

He goes for the notepad first, abandoning the half drained glass in the sink. He recognizes the handwriting immediately as Sonya’s, looping and slanted to the right. It’s easy enough to read in the light of the full moon:

_ Hey Newt, know you’re not up to talking about this yet but I looked into some stuff that might point us in the right direction with Thomas’ messages/how he communicates!!! let me know if you want to discuss _

He flips the notebook over to the next page, a jumble of words encased in boxes and connected by arrows, some sections circled or underlined. There are a few things that jump out at him, things he hadn’t even considered in the wake of his receiving of Thomas’ messages, like  _ technology - radio waves? what frequencies _ ,  _ power surges/electrical storms/electromagnetic anomalies (town history - newspaper archives?),  _ and  _ two-way communication,  _ the last one circled over several times with a bunch of questions marks surrounding it.

Even in his groggy state, Newt is overcome with a surge of gratitude and pride in his sister. It is marred only by the thought that the page looks far, far too much like his own notes, scattered and frantic. But with his throat no longer a tube of sandpaper, the beckon of sleep wins out over paranoia and Newt goes back to bed, making a mental note to perhaps stop underestimating his little sister’s brilliance. 

 

The next morning, Newt walks into homeroom and Teresa is already there, his phone laid face down on top of her binder. He’d walked in with the intention of interrogating her - what happened to her yesterday, what did she mean when she said  _ it’s him _ , how did she intend to fix Newt’s phone, what did she hear from Thomas on Sunday night, and whatever else happened to spill over the low wall of restraint that barely guarded his tongue - but again, something in her face stopped him cold, not a single word passing through his lips as she slid his phone (functioning perfectly, of course) towards him, silently. 

He tells himself that this is trust, and that this is what friendship looks like, but somewhere deep down, the same part of him that knows that Thomas is still out there somewhere also knows that what he is doing is not trust, nor friendship.

It is distancing, and it is another thing Newt can add to the list of reasons why he hates himself.

 

the list (an abridged version)

_ \- food _

_ \- drove parents away (dead & missing) _

_ \- can barely provide for sonya _

_ \- alive = drain on resources _

_ \- not alive = leave sonya alone _

_ \- thomas _

and, now,

_ \- teresa _

 

Things continue on, precarious.

 

He accidentally stays up until sunrise on the last Sunday of the month, and decides not to bother with sleep until night falls again. It clearly messes with his cognitive abilities for the day, though, because he decides to bother with going to church for the first time in his life. He’s not actually religious in any way, but, he has been steadily making his way through the bible for the past three months or so. 

If he’s being honest with himself, Newt’s been losing steam on the catholicism stream of his research for the past while. There was just so much content to wade through, with only about one passage every few hundred pages worth noting. And besides, angels were present in nearly every religion and mythology from every civilization to ever exist. He still has a very large number of other venues to pursue.

But, that morning, something urges him to attend service, so he puts on Thomas’ old jean jacket and walks through the early morning mist toward the towering spires peeking out over the middle of town.

 

(If he’s learned anything in the past months, it’s to trust the pull he feels in the electricity sitting low in his fingertips and throat. Four days ago, he woke up with the thought that if there was fog outside, then Thomas would be fine. 

It had been foggy every day since.)

 

The service is about as drab and uninspiring as he’d been expecting, no part of the sermon bringing sudden enlightenment or clarity. He supposes that’s probably not how it works, but still.

By the time he gets out, the fog is cleared. 

 

Things continue on, uninspired.

 

They get a week off of school in March and Newt decides to dedicate that time to parsing through the multitude of suspicious folders - strictly disappearance related, not regular teenage boy related - on the copy of Thomas’ computer. 

This is when he finds the first actual, tangible clue in perhaps this entire ordeal.

The folder is unlabelled, and it is full of images, both scans of Thomas’ sketches and some clearly taken from the internet. He double clicks on the first one, bringing it into full view - it’s one of his own sketches, instantly recognizable as a study of their statue. Newt can identify the cross-hatch style as Thomas’ right away. The next picture is the same figure, but this time it’s definitely not Thomas’. There’s more detail than their statue - some etching on the breastplate of the angel’s armour, and some demonic creatures curling up at its feet, but it’s definitely the same subject. The next one is another picture from the internet, this one in colour and slightly more stylized, with a spear instead of a sword. The next three are more of Thomas’ sketches, two Newt remembers seeing him draw.

The thumbnails sit scattered on the screen, separate, until all at once the pieces fall into place.

They are all the same angel.

This is not just a random statue.

Maybe it’s another Sonya  _ duh  _ moment, but Newt’s heart pounds all the same. He scans the folder for any more clues, eye catching on each picture as he realizes they all have something very specific in common.

The scales.

Weighing their souls. 

Sonya was actually right. 

Not that he should be surprised by that, but. This was something - this was really, truly, actually  _ something _ , something that was gonna get him closer to bringing Thomas back. 

There’s just one snag - a worrying undertone to the excitement and the dull thud of his heart still beating out of his chest: clearly, Thomas knew that this angel -  _ their  _ angel - was, well,  _ this  _ angel. So why didn’t he tell Newt? Why did he continue to refer to it as their angel, or the statue, or simply  _ it _ , when he knew it had outside meaning - maybe even a name - tied to it?

And why did he hide it from Newt?

 

Things continue on, dizzying.

 

One night, he ends up in what is quite possibly the most terrifyingly ominous setting he’s ever been in, which is saying a lot considering his boyfriend’s preferred method of contact these days. How he ended up there is not important, it is just annoying, and, even though no one is there to witness it - embarrassing (long walk in the woods, then past the woods, then a short spell of blackouts due to not eating dinner, (or lunch, or breakfast) then trying to go home but walking in the complete opposite direction due to confusion from aforementioned blackouts). 

He is in a corn field. It is approximately ten at night. 

This would be a lot less concerning if he knew of any corn fields surrounding the woods behind his house.

Briefly, he wonders if he has been transported to some sort of alternate reality. It certainly wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that’s happened to him in the past year. 

Then, he briefly wonders if he is insane, and checks his phone to see three missed calls and seven texts from his sister. 

 

He does not tell her about the blackouts or the corn field. 

 

Things continue on, slightly worrying.

 

Just over two full months after receiving it, he finally gathers up the courage to open the book Teresa gave him on his birthday, filled with pages upon pages of writing and sketches from Thomas. It takes him an hour from the time that he picks it up to the time that he manages to pry it open, but it happens. 

And it is so much worse than he had been expecting.

The majority of it is drawings, all paired with little notes or explanations of what it is or what happened that day or sometimes entirely unrelated thoughts. There are also a fair amount of fortune cookie fortunes and random food receipts, mostly from their Wednesday night Chinese take-out tradition - Thomas would pick Newt up from work at the library, and then the two of them (and sometimes Sonya) would eat it on the floor of Newt’s living room while watching Jeopardy reruns.

But then there are pages filled completely with Thomas’ loopy, scrawling text, and those  are the pages that Newt cannot bring himself to look at.  _ Not right now, it hurts too much _ , he tells himself, but then that sends him wondering: will it ever not hurt too much? Is he ever going to be able to read the words he left for him? 

He knows rationally that there are probably some tangible clues hidden in Thomas’ words, especially towards the end, if the way his writing slowly changes from semi-neat to nearly incomprehensible in the last used pages is an indication of anything. 

The last forty pages or so of the book are completely blank, pretty much pristine compared to the way the rest of the book bulges and crinkles. It feels too on the nose, like a physical representation of his presence vanishing suddenly, all these blank pages where he should have been. Shivers rack through his body, making him feel sick. The book still smells like Thomas, almost imperceptible, but still there, even if just barely. 

The sweaters Thomas left in his drawer at Newt’s had stopped smelling like him months ago. 

He is unable to read more than two or three full pages before his heart constricts and his eyes blur, but.

On page 46, there is a single line encased in quotations. 

Newt remembers the moment he said it.

 

It was a warm night, nearly a year ago:

 

“I can’t imagine ever loving anything more than I love you, Tommy.”

It had just slipped out, inhibitions erased by the lowering veil of sleep. He didn’t even remember thinking it, the words moving directly from his heart to his tongue, and landing in the space between their breaths. 

Thomas just smiled, sinking further into the pillow as he exhaled in a way that could only accurately be described as  _ dreamily _ . Quietly, he hummed, “Love you, Newt.”

 

It was a very small moment, nearly a blink in the story of their time spent walking this Earth together (a story that had been cut too short too soon, one that Newt intends to extend, even if he has to sew in every additional page himself).

It was a very small moment and it was a sweet moment, one Newt looked back on with fondness.

The same could not be said for the one that followed shortly after.

Newt had always had trouble falling asleep, his body tending to only be calm enough to rest in that late-early stretch of time well past midnight, and then holding onto sleep for dear life, as long as it could. Thomas, on the other hand, was one of those assholes that got tired around 9:00pm, and then had the nerve to  _ actually fall asleep at 9:00pm.  _ It infuriated Newt to no end.

He was lying in his bed, curled onto his side and watching Thomas’ sleeping profile. His chest rose steadily, his hand - Newt’s own held softly inside the curve of his fingertips - moving up and down in time with his breaths. The sound is victoriously calming - towards the start of their relationship, Newt’s issues with sleeping had been a good deal worse. And the sound of Thomas breathing had, at first, only exacerbated that, sending him into a spiral of anxiety because  _ I can’t sleep if it’s not completely silent.  _ But somewhere along the way, something just changed, and the sound of Thomas’ breaths had morphed into a comfort, lulling him to sleep.

He knew that it probably had less to do with the actual sound itself and more with the implied fact that Thomas was  _ there _ , but. Thomas was always the sappy one, he could take on the task of writing poetry about feeling safe in the other’s presence. 

Thomas was breathing, Newt was listening, drifting. 

Then Thomas was talking.

It had happened before. It was not a concern. But.

“Beth,” he mumbled, eyebrows dropping low over his fluttering eyelids, “Beth, I’m -  _ no _ .”

He muttered the name a few more times, breath catching once or twice in his throat. Newt considered waking him up, like he’d done the first couple instances of Thomas’ cryptic sleep talking, but he decided against it. All it had earned him in the past was a grumpy boyfriend with no recollection of anything he’d been talking about seconds prior. 

So, Newt just gave his hand a gentle squeeze, and tangled a leg around Thomas’ before shutting his eyes and completely forgetting about the nonsense just tumbled from Thomas’ lips.

(For, approximately, eleven more months.)

Things continue on - precarious, uninspired, dizzying, and slightly worrying.

They continue on, and on, and on, until eventually, things continue to continue on, but they do so relatively uneventfully.

 

Until, of course, they don’t.

  
  


With exams finished for the year, the only thing standing between Newt and a long Summer of god knows what is the junior prom. It is an hour and a half before the event officially begins, and he is sitting at the kitchen table letting Sonya fuss over his hair while he tries not to think about the fact that this is yet another milestone he is experiencing both without his parents, and now, without Thomas.

She seems to sense the cloud of doom hanging over him, and starts to talk. “Your hair is getting  _ long _ ,” she comments, running her fingers through to the ends, curling down an inch or two below his ears. “I might be able to braid it soon, maybe a little one at the top.” She moves now to his hairline, pushing the hair over to the side. He’s seen her do braids up in that sort of area on Teresa, intricate and close down to the scalp, the rest of her hair flowing down over her shoulders - they’re really pretty, actually. Newt doesn’t think he would mind if Sonya wanted to put one of those in his hair, but he doesn’t have the emotional energy to communicate that right now so he just smiles and gives a little nod. 

She falls silent again after that, popping out into the backyard with the promise to return a minute later. Newt stays put, fiddling with the sleeves of his suit - his dad’s suit, left in his closet among the many other things that stayed in the house when he disappeared (among the things that didn’t stay: his wallet, his phone, and his extra wad of cash he kept neatly underneath the cutlery tray in the kitchen, the one he’d thought Newt didn’t know about). It’s simple, black and plainly cut. The fabric is beginning to pill slightly, but otherwise it’s holding up just fine, which can probably be attributed to the fact that Newt can’t actually remember ever seeing his dad wear it. It drapes slightly weirdly over his body, excess material bunching and folding in odd places. His belt is cinched to the tightest notch, but he knows that when he stands up his pants will still slide a tad too low over his hips.

He tries to ignore the weird, sick satisfaction that comes from realizing that it used to fit him better - tighter - a few years ago, just after he’d finished his growth spurt. 

Sonya comes back then, a small bouquet of mismatched flowers in her hands. 

“We have some options for the boutonni è re,” she says, flaunting her apparently existent French skills, “so take a look at these and tell me which you like best.”

“For the _what_?”  
She just barely avoids rolling her eyes. “The flower that gets pinned to the lapel of the suit.”

“Oh.” 

She lays about five or six different flowers across the table, most of which Newt proudly notes that he can name: first is baby’s breath, usually used as an accent flower with other, bigger ones. He’s always liked how that one looks when Sonya weaves it through her or Teresa’s hair (and sometimes Harriet’s and Aris’, though his is more of a challenge to accomplish). Next is a rose, dark red to match Sonya’s nails. After that is one he can’t quite place, and then a carnation. He’s pretty sure the one beside that is an orange dahlia, but he could be wrong. The last one sits a little further from the rest, the petals soft and white.

“That one,” he says softly, pointing to the final option, rush of melancholy flooding through him. “Gardenia, right?”

Her faces falls just a bit, imperceptible, as she realizes. “Yeah,” she says, offering a watered-down smile, “good choice. Maybe some baby’s breath to go with it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

 

It was April, three years prior. A little less than a month after Thomas had bought his first cabbage from Sonya’s garden, she and Newt were invited to dinner at Thomas’ house. It was a featured star of the meal, and ample praise was directed to his sister as they all happily admitted - it was actually  _ really  _ good.

After dinner was finished, Thomas’ parents had cornered Sonya.

His mom had insisted on setting up a biweekly vegetable delivery, in which Sonya would bring over some of her seasonal harvest and they would pay her well above market value. 

(“I’m sure you’ve seen how much of a challenge it is to get Thomas to eat vegetables. And you know how much he adores you - you’re doing  _ us _ a favour, Sonya.)

And once she’d finally agreed to the arrangement, both tearfully thankful and thoroughly shocked at how much money they’d  _ insisted  _ on paying, Thomas’ dad had proceeded to monopolize her for the rest of the night, geeking out over gardening techniques as he showed Sonya his set up in the front yard. It was mostly flowers, but there was a good amount of plain, leafy shrubbery to balance out the display. 

At the end of the night, he’d given her a couple bags of seeds, all different varieties of flowers.

(“Growing vegetables can get pretty boring - make sure you have some colour in that greenhouse of yours, young lady.”)

She’d promised not to let him down - and still true to her word, three years later, the greenhouse was an explosion of colour. Buttercups, peonies, and zinnias (her personal favourite) filled the back portion of the room, painting a sea of colour. There were also a few subtler species, pale greens and creamy whites. She’d amassed quite the variety over the years, nearly surpassing Mr. Murphy in number of species. 

But along the south wall, there was one flower that had been there since the start, plain and unassuming but claiming the title of first flower planted since the revival of the greenhouse itself.

The gardenia was always Newt’s favourite. That night, he, Thomas, and Teresa had gone out to the front yard to join Sonya and Mr. Murphy, briefly jumping into the flower discourse as the two of them talked animatedly. 

“Hands down, that’s the best one,” he said, nodding toward the bush of white flowers.

They all looked at him, varying degrees of confusion and amusement spread across their faces.

“The gardenias? Really?” Thomas was the first to ask the question, regarding Newt with an odd expression, one he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

(Later, Newt would learn to call that  _ love _ .)

“Really,” he decided, commiting the word  _ gardenia  _ to memory. 

Thomas tilted his head. “Interesting.” 

It was not brought up again that night, but then three months later: a bouquet of them were nervously presented to Newt at his doorstep, accompanied by a rather silly question, one that both of them had known the answer to for a long, long time. 

After that there were gardenias everywhere in the background of Newt’s life, like afterthoughts sitting quietly in his mind, all of them whispering  _ i love you _ through the velvety touch of their petals: in vases by the kitchen sink, on the top shelf of his locker, on his seat in the car. Thomas had pretty much conditioned him into instantly forgetting whatever bad mood he’d been in as soon as he saw the familiar white petals. 

But now, Sonya is wordlessly pinning a bulb of gardenia onto Newt’s suit jacket and he is only slipping deeper and deeper into the spiral of whatever nostalgia-fueled funk he’s created in the pit of his stomach. Suddenly, Teresa’s voice pops into his mind.  _ Maybe Pavlov was a little bitch after all _ . 

(It was earlier that semester, a rare lunch where she had spent most of it talking, telling him and Minho about her failed experiment for her psych class.)

The memory is enough to put a tiny smile on his lips, if only momentarily. Sonya notices and perks up a little bit as she smooths down the lapels of his suit. She steps back and motions for him to stand and turn, giving him a once over as he complies, only slightly annoyed by the pageantry of it all.

She clasps her hands together, and smiles wide. “Alright, I think you’re all set to go.”

“But it still doesn’t start for more than an hour,” he says, glancing down at his phone to check the time. He wasn’t supposed to leave to pick up Minho and Teresa for another forty-five minutes.

Sonya’s smile turns somewhat devious, and Newt feels the  _ slightly annoyed  _ turning into  _ I would like to die now _ as he senses what is coming.

“Oh, I know  _ that.  _ Now it’s time for pictures!”

 

Three hours later, Newt is ready to be back home. The prom itself is nice enough, twinkling lights strung across the ceiling in a low-hanging canopy and dark blue fabric draping dramatically over the gymnasium walls. He’s pretty sure the theme is supposed to be starry night or something along those lines, which Thomas probably would have loved. 

No, scratch that -  _ absolutely  _ would have loved. He would’ve dragged Newt around the room from one tacky space motif to the next, that big goofy grin on his face the whole time. He would’ve taken approximately one million pictures with him, Minho, and Teresa at both the station with the professional photographer and then the photo booth, decorations and all. Newt wouldn’t put it past him to lie down on the scuff-marked floor and try to make out constellations from the lights above.

To Newt, they just look like lights. The stars had always just looked like lights to him before Thomas came along to make sense of it all. And now that he’s gone, it’s not just the stars that are a mystery to him - it’s everything.

He’s really not sure how he made it here, sitting alone at a folding table covered in a dollar store tablecloth in the school’s gym. He’s not really sure how he made it to any milestone in his life since August. Somehow, there had been so many of them already passing him by: first of Teresa’s (and Thomas’) birthdays since - since Thomas left, since Newt’s world was shattered, since everything stopped making sense, just  _ since _ \- first Halloween, first Thanksgiving, first Christmas. His, Sonya, and Minho’s birthdays. First failed test - both  _ since _ and  _ ever _ . Christ, first bloody Chinese take-out order since the last time they’d eaten it together on the living room floor while watching Jeopardy reruns. 

Everything feels like a first, and everything feels awful.

And now, there’s this. 

Almost an entire school year has passed without him, and it’s right there in the stink of sweat and cologne that Newt realizes he’s gotten used to living in the time  _ since.  _ He’s gotten used to not looking around the corner to see if Thomas is coming to meet him at his locker between third and fourth period. He’s gotten used to letting his backpack occupy the space beside him at the lunch table, the one where Thomas used to sit. He’s gotten used to Thomas not being there - and he’s gotten used to not  _ expecting  _ him to be.

He suddenly feels incredibly sick, and gets up and heads straight for the washroom even though he knows that there’s nothing in his stomach for him to throw up. He doesn’t care. Maybe once he’s cradling a toilet bowl the familiar coolness of the porcelain will activate some reflex in him and he’ll end up being able to get some bile out, at least. Even that would be more of a comfort than the realization that he’s now somehow become  _ complacent  _ in all of this, like he never even cared in the first place.

Despicable. Disgusting.  _ Deplorable.  _ Maybe he  _ should _ throw up, for no reason other than that he deserves it.

He is halfway to ripping the cufflinks out of his sleeves so that he can roll them up when he crashes into Minho. He’s on his way out of the bathroom, buttoning up his suit jacket with a frown. 

“Shit,” he swears. There is the tiniest hint of a  _ snarl  _ in his voice, which Newt would have been all over except for the fact that he is too taken aback by the unintelligible stench of whiskey coming off of him to say anything at all.

“Hey,” Newt says, cautiously.

Minho finally looks up at the sound of his voice, and the anger on his face immediately dissolves into something calmer. It’s definitely not a happy expression, but it’s not sad, either. Newt is quite unsettled at the fact that he cannot identify it.

“You good?”

Minho nods much too quickly. “Yeah, yeah, just takin’ a leak,” he says, which is not something he has ever said before. 

Newt narrows his eyes, just ever so slightly. “Cool.”

“ _ You _ good?” Minho asks, somewhat accusatory, nodding down toward Newt’s dishevelled sleeve, pushed up to expose about half of his forearm. 

He sighs and straightens out his sleeve, fiddling to put the cufflink back in. “Yeah, fine.” And then, because this is Minho, and he knows Minho is not his teachers or his other classmates or even Teresa: “No. This sucks.”

Minho widens his eyes and lets his head roll lazily on his neck. “Tell me about it.” Neither of them have to say why - they are both acutely aware. It hangs heavy in the air between them, the ever-present unoccupied space where their best friend used to be. After a moment or two of wallowing in this, Minho moves to lean a hand against the wall and misses entirely.

“Fuck,” he mutters as he folds to the ground. Newt jumps in immediately, snapping out of his funk as he grabs one of Minho’s arms.

“Hey man, you good?” He asks, repeating himself. It’s at this moment that Newt realizes that Minho is substantially more wasted than he previously let on. Which is worrying to say the least, but it’s only made worse by the fact that they’re at a school function. 

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” he insists, shaking Newt off of him as he stands, frowning again. “I’m good.”

He sighs and tries not to let the sadness overwhelm him again.  _ You should probably check in on him a little more often,  _ he notes to himself. Once Minho is done smoothing his suit down, Newt sighs again and nods back toward the gym. “C’mon, let’s go sit down.”

Once he has Minho set up with a cup of water and a paper plate of grocery store cookies, he starts clearing the rest of the table.

Maybe cleaning will be his new anxious habit. The pile of dishes sitting in his sink back home would certainly appreciate it. He manages to carry all of it in one trip, and begins sorting the garbage, recycling, and compost like it’s a normal lunch period in the gym-cafeteria hybrid and there isn’t terrible music playing and his best friend isn’t wasted and his boyfriend isn’t missing and everything isn’t awful. He’s almost through with his sorting when the distinct  _ click click  _ of heels on tile approaches from behind him.

“You can’t recycle the red cups, they’re not the right kind of plastic.” He turns around to see Teresa standing there with her hands clasped behind her back, shoulders hunched quietly forward. She peers around him and a second later a ghost of a smile appears on her lips. “Got everything else right, though.” 

Newt sighs for what feels like the thousandth time that night, and resigns almost immediately to spending the next two minutes of his life digging through the bin to retrieve the aforementioned red cups and put them in their rightful resting place. 

“You decide to tell me that  _ after  _ I’m finished putting them all in the recycling?”

She rolls her eyes slightly and tucks her loosely curled hair behind her ears, crouching down to his level to help rummage through the mass of cups and other questionably recycling-friendly items. They sort through the trash in comfortable silence, walking wordlessly together over to the nearest hand sanitizer dispenser once the deed is done. They lean against the wall and watch the crowd of people dancing raunchily to the latest radio garbage. 

Teresa chews on a fingernail, dark blue to match her sparkly dress. “He would have loved this,” she says, so softly Newt almost doesn’t catch it. She looks over at him and smiles the saddest smile he’s ever seen. “He was going to wear blue,” she says, ceiling of lights reflecting in her eyes, “he always said that he was going to wear blue to our prom. One time, back in grade eight, our mom got him this dark blue hoodie. He didn’t like it, but he wore it to school the next day because she wanted him to. At lunch you told him you liked it, and then we went home and he - he got this look on his face, like he had everything figured out - and he told me he was going to wear blue to our prom.”

Newt knows the sweater she’s talking about. It’s sitting at home, folded neatly in the bottom drawer of his dresser - Thomas’ drawer.

There are no words in his brain and no breath in his lungs. He opens his mouth anyway, praying that some comforting string of words will exit and be just the right thing Teresa needs to hear in that moment.

Shockingly, his vocal cords do not develop the ability to produce speech without first receiving input from his brain. Teresa does not hold this against him, and turns to look back at the crowd, pensive. A minute or so later, the song changes from an upbeat tune to a slower, softer one. Both of them recognize it immediately from the kick of the drums signalling the intro, then the singer’s voice croaking into the first verse shortly afterwards.

“Would you like to dance?” Newt asks before he can even register the question in his own mind, a single hand held out to Teresa. 

Her breath catches just slightly, quiet but still audible in the relative calm of their corner of the gym. She blinks for a second before nodding, lips inching minutely upwards. They both know that it is not the same, perhaps not even close, but:

“I would love to.”

They are teetering on the outskirts of the designated dance floor, swaying slowly as the song continues languidly on. Newt’s hands rest on her waist while hers perch on his shoulders, the both of them careful, guarded. The ribbon around her wrist is accentuated with a single flower, matching the one Sonya had prepared for him that afternoon. It’s smaller than his, the petals just shy of wilting.

Thomas always used to help out in their dad’s garden, so Newt supposes it makes sense that the flowers - the gardenias especially - aren’t as healthy anymore. 

Neither of them are actually trying to dance, something for which Newt is grateful. They kind of just breathe back and forth, feet barely moving. Teresa stares at the ground and Newt stares over her shoulder and at the wall. It’s awkward, but it’s all they have.

When she finally looks up, there is a silent tear moving down her cheek. 

“When we were little, I used to make him slow dance with me so that I’d know how to do it once I finally got asked.”

Now, they’re both crying. Newt surprises himself once again by speaking.

“Well, you’re doing a great job,” he says, which earns a sniffling laugh against his shoulder as she lays her head there. 

She shakes her head. “Thanks, Newt.” They share a smile for a moment and then it is gone. Out of the corner of his eye he sees her bite her lip, contemplating. She appears to be ramping up for something, and Newt is not sure he wants to know what.

“What did he say to you, the night that we all went out to see the statue?” she asks softly, not moving, catching him completely off-guard. After she’d given him back his phone and in no uncertain facial expression implied that she basically never wanted to discuss it again, Newt really wasn’t expecting ever to talk about that day - or that  _ night _ \- again.

_ I’m sorry. I don’t think I can save her _ . Just thinking about the way his voice strained makes Newt want to run out of the gym right then and there. Teresa blinks at him expectantly and he feels that rush of protectiveness come over him again. The message was  _ his _ . 

But it wasn’t, really, and deep down Newt knows this, so he swallows his weird unwelcome pride and tells her. “He said that he was sorry, and that - that he didn’t think he could…” He trails off for just a second, hesitating - did Thomas  _ want  _ Teresa to know that he couldn’t save her? Didn’t he tell her the same thing? The deliberation lasts only for a short moment and then he ends it with “save you” at the exact same time as Teresa says, “save her.”

Teresa frowns, nearly ripping her head off his shoulder. “Wait, what?”

“He doesn’t - he doesn’t think he can save you. Now I don’t know what that actually  _ means _ , because you don’t seem to need any-”

“Newt,” she cuts him off, voice low. “Do you think he was talking about me?”

At this point, the song they’d begun dancing to is over, something a little faster and more radio-friendly taking its place. Newt can barely hear it over the static in his head. They’ve stopped swaying, frozen in place on the outer edges of the crowd, still joined by the electricity flowing through their fingertips, attached at the hips and shoulders. Teresa trembles slightly. 

“Newt,” she begins again, watery eyes boring uncomfortably into his. Then that’s when he notices it, as he’s trying to avoid her gaze.

“Teresa, have you ever broken your finger?” His voice is calmer than he’d expected, which throws her for even more of a loop as her face contorts into apprehensive confusion. She pulls away, holding her hand - the one with the pinky that had lied slightly crooked on his shoulder just seconds prior - close to her chest. It’s her left hand, which Newt realizes, ever so sudden and ever so revolutionary,  _ matches _ .

The gym and the music falls away, leaving only crumbling limestone and epiphanies. “Oh my god, it’s  _ you. _ Of course it’s you, you’re the one that ties this all together.” 

Teresa just stares at him, blank face giving way to anger as hot tears burn down her face. She opens and closes her mouth a couple times but nothing comes out. 

Newt continues on, an unstoppable force, barely registering her change in emotion. “It makes sense - because, because - if they broke  _ your  _ finger, and then the two of you started hearing - wait, no, but. Wait. You and Thomas are the only ones connected to them, so when  _ I  _ broke their fingers and - bloody hell, that’s right.” He is muttering under his breath now, strings twisting and unravelling and tying together so fast his mouth can’t keep up. He vaguely knows that he might  _ sound  _ like he’s currently spewing absolute nonsense, but it is so, so much more than that.

“Teresa, don’t you see? It’s _you._ You’re at the center of it all.”

She has backed several steps away from him. “I’m not at the center of anything, Newt,” she nearly snarls, wiping violently at the tears that continue to fall onto her face, “The message wasn’t about  _ me _ , it was-” she cuts herself off abruptly, snapping her mouth closed and breathing heavily through her nose. The two of them are locked in a standoff, neither moving but poised to jump at the slightest sound. 

Newt is thrust back into the dim, twinkling light of the gym, and for the first time he absorbs the horror, frustration, and sadness mixed into the melting stew of Teresa’s quickly crumbling face. He is tied up in the cacophony of the strings, holding everything in place with the abruptly careful, calculated stillness of his thoughts. Something as simple as the minute pulse of a single muscle could send everything into ruin.

His tongue twitches, the metallic taste of rising doom settling onto his taste buds. “Who was it about, then?”

She does not move, does not speak. Were it not for the steady stream of tears dripping from her chin, Newt would think  _ she  _ was a statue.

The taste of copper fills his mouth. He repeats himself, louder this time. “Teresa, who was it  _ about? _ ”

For one second, it looks like she is going to tell him. Her shoulders fall and she inhales deeply, closing her eyes. She looks like the poster child of resignation, ready to fall apart then and there on the floor of their high school gym with garbage music blaring and their entire grade watching in the background. Newt realizes then that their interaction has garnered more than a few prying eyes, all feigning subtlety as they try to get a glimpse of the trainwreck that is the sister and the boyfriend of that kid who went missing last Summer. 

She looks like she is going to tell him, but then she exhales an almost-laugh, incredibly bitter and almost self-important, face flashing into an expression that seems to say  _ you don’t even know the half of it  _ before she collapses in on herself once again. Now she just looks  _ sad _ , so unbelievably sad that Newt almost forgets the lightning flash of a second just before.

He takes a step forward, but then she is turning on a bedazzled heel and click-clacking her way out of the room with vigour, leaving him behind in the wreckage of whatever the hell just happened. 

Her words swirl through his mind, cutting strings left and right as he stands there in the vast tundra of the dance floor. He’s not entirely sure of it all - hell, he’s not even a little bit sure of  _ most _ of it, now - but he knows, like most things that have happened to him in the last year of his life:

It is not over.

 

It is not over. Nothing is ever over. But this specific  _ it _ comes back much sooner than Newt had anticipated or prepared for.

It is the next day, and he is making his morning (read: noon-thirty) tea when the front door opens and closes with notable force, his sister emerging from the hall into the kitchen with very fake and very thinly-veiled calm. 

Sonya, is not happy.

“How was prom?” she asks, not a single emotion discernible in her voice.

He braces himself, and matches her tone. “Prom was fine.” Prom was in fact not fine, on many different levels for many different reasons, but he doesn’t need to bother her with that. It seems, though, that he already has.

“It was fine?”

“It was fine. How was Harriet’s?”

She puts her backpack down on one of the kitchen chairs, just short of slamming it. “Really nice, thank you for asking, until she took me round town to run this week’s orders.”

Newt carefully removes the tea bag from his mug, not letting his eyes leave the soon-to-be eruption that is the rumbling volcano of his sister. Normally she is sugary sweet, but right now she is as bitter as he’s ever seen. He knows that Teresa’s family is one of the only ones that gets an order every single week, which his super-sleuthing skills tell him is maybe part of why she is upset. She’s always had this soft spot for Teresa, unspoken but glaringly loud simply in the way she looks at her, rest of the world seeming to fall away.

There is no such softness now as Newt waits for what is next, completely uncharted territory.

And clearly waiting was the wrong move, because she looks even angrier when she realizes he will not be responding to her, calm facade completely abandoned. A long, awful beat passes and she widens her eyes - her turn to wait.

Newt sighs. “Listen, Son-”

This is all she needs. “No, you listen. You ever stop to think, just for one second, about anyone else’s feelings? Have you ever done that? Do you know how to do that?” She pauses just long enough for Newt to realize that he is in for a grand old fucking time. 

“I don’t think you do, because if you did, you wouldn’t treat Teresa like she was a fucking adversary to your very existence. She’s supposed to be your friend, right? One of your  _ best  _ friends? ‘Cause I sure as hell don’t go around telling Harriet and Aris that they’re the reason their siblings up and disappeared.”

“I didn’t tell-”

“ _ No _ , I’m not done. Have you ever thought about the fact that maybe you’re not the only one that’s been affected by all of this? That - heaven forbid, maybe Teresa might be worse off than you are when it comes to Thomas? Because, frankly, Newt, I think she might be. Her  _ twin brother  _ literally vanished and not a single person can even begin to explain why, and now her best friend is not only abandoning her, but blaming her for it all, and for the way she’s reacting to it. Can you not see how fucked up that is?”

Now she expects an answer, and Newt is quiet. “I never said I blamed her.” He doesn’t ask how Sonya knows all of this - he’s not sure he even wants to know. Sonya crosses her arms and leans back on the table, clearly waiting for more. He sighs deeply, any fight he had in him melting away. He takes a long sip of his tea, wishing he could hide inside the warmth before he speaks again. “I’m not - I’m not doing very well.”

“None of us are doing very well! In case you haven’t noticed, no one’s fucking handling anything! I haven’t seen Minho cry  _ once _ , and Teresa’s one wrong word from falling apart at any given second. Her parents are barely there either, and then there’s you with the  _ fucking  _ angels.”

Newt swears he can feel his blood go frozen solid in his veins. “Now what’s  _ that  _ supposed to mean?”

It’s surprising, but perhaps it shouldn’t be - Sonya doesn’t back down in the slightest. “It  _ means  _ that you’re acting just like he did last Summer.”

“And what makes you think you know how he was acting?”

“I don’t know, Newt, maybe you should ask Teresa.” There is a long pause where the tension - heavy and unfamiliar, like two sides of a chasm they’d always braved together - hangs in the space between the two of them, and then Sonya sighs forcefully. “Look, you know that I love you and that I will always be with you, but jesus fucking christ, Newt, you need to get your head out of your ass. Your actions have consequences and you need to start thinking about other people and not just yourself.”

There’s a rush of guilt then, and Newt takes a second to wonder just how long he’s been a massive piece of shit. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he already knows that Sonya is right, at least partly. He barely even  _ remembers  _ most of his and Teresa’s conversation from the night before, just the overwhelming feeling of revelation, and then her tears. 

“Alright,” he says, leaning onto the counter. “Alright.”

Her face softens for just a second, relief flooding over her features before she hardens again, as if remembering that she is angry. “And eat breakfast.”

“Sonya-”

“Isaac Newton Ross. You are going to cook yourself some eggs and you are going to eat them or so help me god.”

And apparently, that is the end of that discussion because fifteen minutes later, Newt is sat at the table chewing on a mouthful of slightly burnt eggs as Sonya rummages around noisily in her room. The eggs are disgusting and he feels disgusting, but he takes bite after bite without complaint. With last night and this morning combined, he doesn’t have it in him to protest anything else. He’s almost done the plate when she emerges from her room once more, dropping a duffel bag at the front door and then going out back to the greenhouse without a word. 

When she comes back, she is holding a single, massive zucchini. 

“I’m going to the city with Harriet and her sister for a few days. Fix things with Teresa and don’t burn the house down.”

He supposes that this is the time where he should say something, something that would indicate he’s the older brother and stand-in parent and has maybe some sort of authority over his baby sister, but instead he just gives a weak, “okay,” and lets her walk out the front door, duffel bag over her shoulder and comically large zucchini under her arm.

It is a couple of minutes later when he is washing his plate that Newt realizes that somewhere along the way, Sonya grew up without him even realizing it. 

 

(Later that night, once Sonya is gone and the house has settled back into its normal quiet, Newt receives a text from Minho informing him that he will be dining at the Park household that evening. There is little room for negotiation, and when he’s sitting at the table with Minho and his mom later that night, he takes note of the fact that they are eating zucchini casserole.)

 

The first week of Summer feels like a dull haze pulled over his eyes, muddling his vision and his thoughts. The library immediately gets busier as school ends, families and their children and camp programming taking up the floor and ruining the usual quiet atmosphere. Newt doesn’t want to be a cliche, but he has a couple more  _ shhh _ ’s left in him for the particularly rowdy ones. He constantly reminds himself: he’s made it through three Summers at the library, he can make it through this one.

It’s times like these that he wishes their branch was like the one in the city - the previous Spring, once he’d finally  _ officially  _ gotten his driver’s license, (one credit that could be awarded to his dad was that he’d started teaching Newt to drive when he was thirteen - god knows why, but by the time he’d disappeared Newt was more than fine driving on his own) Mary had sent him on a late night run to the city’s branch so she could get a particular book to one of her favourite patrons before close. It was the first time he’d been there, and he’d spent enough afternoons reshelving hundreds of books to appreciate the fact that they had the children’s section on a separate floor, much unlike  _ his  _ branch. 

It’s one particularly hot Tuesday morning when Newt comes into work, thanking every god from every religion he’s studied in vain for the wall of cold that hits him the second he enters the building. 

(Their car’s AC broke when Newt was thirteen, and he’d spent that entire Summer listening to his dad promise he’d take it to the city to get it fixed before it got too hot. Which, quite obviously, never ended up happening.)

Mary is already there when he walks into the otherwise empty library, gazing intently at her computer screen with a slight frown on her face. She looks up when he sets his backpack down on the counter, frown dissolving into a smile.

“Hey, Newt, your book came in last night.” She hands him a moderately sized hardback and he nods a thanks. 

The corners are a lot fresher than he’d been used to lately, and the smell is a lot nicer, too. That’s the thing about working with obscure, outdated religious texts - they’re rarely still in print, which he guesses is the nice thing about working at a library. But he’s been feeling like a change of pace is necessary, so when he scoured the online database during his last shift, it wasn’t the mythology or religious lore that caught his eye but the textbooks on weather.

It’s definitely a jump, but his mind has been wandering lately, once of its most frequent destinations the thought he had, a couple months ago: if he wakes up and there’s fog, then Thomas will be fine. He’s not a superstitious person - well, he  _ wasn’t _ , maybe he is now - but something about the way the statement just appeared in his mind felt so right, like,  _ oh, yeah, of course.  _ Rationally, he knows it’s probably nonsense.

But he still checks his window before he checks his phone in the morning.

He figures that, maybe if he can get a hold on the science behind why fog is a thing, he can maybe start to figure out what it might have to do with Thomas, or the angels.

(Thomas loved the fog, and the rain, and anything that could be considered even slightly atmospheric. It’s no wonder the aestheticism of the angels drew him in.)

He spends most of his free time with Minho, lying on the floor of his room and trying to remember the constellations they made up with Thomas when Minho got all the glow in the dark stars for his birthday that one year. He visits Newt at the library and raids the dvd rental section, trying to find an even more terrible movie to watch together each time they hang out. They sound off each other about the second message and the fabled  _ her _ , and what it could possibly mean paired with the fact that Teresa seemed to be certain that she wasn’t it.

(Newt can’t speak for Minho, maybe he’s less stubborn, but Newt certainly doesn’t think once that they could just  _ ask  _ her, no siree. It’s been nine days since she ran out of the school gym, and he hasn’t had contact with her since.)

“Hey,” Minho starts, lying backwards off the side of his bed, “what if we just - cut off your fingers?”

“Have you got bloody heat stroke or somethin’?” The two of them spent the morning doing yard work for Ms. Park, and while he seemed fine afterwards, Newt thinks now that maybe he should be a little more concerned.

A pillow appears from above the bed, landing smack on Newt’s face. “Shut up,” Minho says, “I mean, like, the scales, man. Eye for an eye. Fingers for fingers.”

“We are not cutting off my fingers.”

“I’m just saying, this could be the answer to all our problems.”

“I really don’t think that’s it.”

“Well, let me know when you get desperate.  I’m pretty sure my mom still has all her power tools somewhere in the garage.”

 

He promises to keep it in mind.

  
  


It takes about a week and a half from the morning she snapped on him, but Sonya finally seems to be getting back to her old self. 

Newt honestly hadn’t expected her to still be upset with him after her weekend with Harriet, but she’d come home and was still noticeably cold around him. Now, it wasn’t like she was giving him any dirty looks, but she definitely wasn’t making his tea in the morning. She wasn’t quite an ice queen - maybe a slightly colder than room temperature queen. Like soup you’ve convinced yourself you’re not going to finish, but then absentmindedly take a spoonful of thirty minutes later to find that you wish you were never born. 

Analogy aside, Newt is now back to having the normal amount of people that are usually annoyed with him, annoyed with him. It’s a remarkably relieving feeling. 

And this is how he knows that she’s really back, entirely and for sure:

It starts the night before, when Newt’s mind thrusts him into the middle of a dream.

 

He is standing on a grassy hill, overlooking an expanse of farmlands. 

He’s been here before, and not just in his dreams. He’s sat there before and watched fireworks, meteor showers, and sunsets aplenty - some with his family and a few by himself, but mostly with Thomas or his friends. 

Now, he is alone, eerily mild nighttime breeze blowing his hair into his face, not quite warm and not quite cool but somewhere between, so close to the temperature of his skin that he can barely feel it. The sky has an eerie green tinge to it, like he’s landed in the middle of some parallel universe, only differing from his own by the hue of the sky. The ground beneath his feet looks off, too, the grass coloured a charcoal black, the smell of smoke rising from his shoes.

But this is dream logic, so all of that seems perfectly fine to him as it’s happening.

The fields fall away to the darkness, leaving only him and the hill. He doesn’t know how he knows this, but he knows that he is the only person that exists on this plane.

However, there are other planes, and they speak to him all at once:

_ Find me _ .

Then the world opens up, unfolding with violent speeds as the fields of wheat extend into the edge of the universe. He is now lying down, one leg folded loosely over the other as he stares up into the murky sky. His left side is considerably warmer than the rest of him, and he automatically knows it’s because Thomas is there.

“Now that one - right there, the bright one -  _ that’s  _ polaris,” he says, voice thick with the fatigue that comes with being out in the early hours of the morning. Newt knows this moment, and has lived it before.  _ A memory _ .

The sky has not yet begun to lighten, but it will soon. 

“That one?”

“No,” Thomas leans his head onto his shoulder, lining up his arm with Newt’s eyeline as he points to a blanket of infinite stars. “that one.”

“Oh,  _ that  _ one, of course.”

“Shut up.” Thomas nudges him, laughing tiredly under his breath. “You never could find him, could you?”

Newt feels like he is floating outside of his body, watching the scene play out below him. 

Two Summers ago, lying on the hill with his fingers laced in Thomas’, he’d shrugged and said something along the lines of, “No, but that’s why I have you.”

Now, held in the cruel hands of his subconscious, Newt is too slow. They go off book, uncharted territory. At first, it is fine.

“It’s right there,” Thomas says, pointing a little more enthusiastically. “Literally. Right. There.”

“Right there? It’s probably, what, a million miles away? I’m sure you’d know the exact figure.”

Newt expects him to shoot back a random number, like he’d done so many times before, but then his face pales and he begins to shake. “I’m right here. Why won’t you find me?” he asks, voice now low and strained as if he’s fighting back a sob. The words heave up and out of his body, throat pulsating thickly with each word. “Are you even trying?”

Suddenly, Newt is back in his own body, standing on the very top of the hill, Thomas grabbing his wrists with frightening strength. He is somewhere between offended and pleading, eyes so dark Newt can’t tell what is pupil and what is iris, or if there is any difference at all.

“Newt, I need you to find me.” He speaks with the utmost urgency, tears flowing down his face in a way that is certainly not human, trembling as if there’s something inside of him trying to break out. “I’m right here. I’m  _ right here. _ ”

And then he’s alone again, suffocating in the swampy expanse of the clouds, choking on the smell of sulfur, fingertips burning. Thomas is gone - he feels the absence like a hole in his leg, aching and cold, sinewy tissues exposed to the world - if that’s still where he is, floating and falling at the same time - but his voice remains, whispers of  _ find me  _ and  _ i’m right here  _ repeating deep in the fibres of his being like a broken record, skipping and tearing the same way his voice had. 

A soft glow starts pulsing from every direction, enveloping Newt as it illuminates the clouds around him. The colour of rot surrounds him, growing brighter and brighter as the air grows dangerously thin, until suddenly there is a hot flash of white, scorching the world into nonexistence, a sickening sensation of nothing saturating Newt before he hits the ground with a muddled  _ thump. _

 

It is with this  _ thump  _ that he smacks his head into the wall, right temple pulsing with sharp hurt immediately as he jolts back into consciousness, breathing heavily and covered in a thin layer of cold sweat.

It takes him a second to realize that he’s in his room, blinking thickly in the shadowy dark. Usually, he can tell about what time it is just by where the sunlight hits in his room - but there is no sunlight, and it certainly isn’t dark enough to still be nighttime. For just one moment he considers that maybe he is still in his dream, but then-

_ His dream.  _ In the ten seconds he’s been awake, he almost forgot about it entirely. The hill just outside of town. Stargazing with Thomas. Not stargazing with Thomas.  _ I’m right here.  _

He’s right there. That’s what he kept repeating, along with  _ find me _ . Newt’s pretty sure  _ those  _ two words would be burned into his brain for the rest of his life, no chances of forgetting. But -  _ I’m right here.  _ There was something off about it, something in the careful articulation of his words the first time Thomas - dream Thomas? - had said it.

He’s right here. Here? Or there?

He was right there.

He-

Oh, shit.

Newt leaps out of bed, bursting into the hallway, the mystery of time be damned. 

“Son, I think I have a lead.”

 

Twenty minutes post-epiphany, Newt, Sonya, and Minho are packed into the car, heading out of town and towards the threatening mass of storm clouds lurking low in the east. 

(The very same storm clouds, which, upon further thought, Newt realizes are the perpetrator of his earlier time-based confusion. It had apparently been just before one thirty in the afternoon when his brain pulled him back into consciousness, which should have come with a patch of sunlight painted onto his closet door.)

It is a couple minutes past two when they pull over on the side of the road, stretch of grass still damp from the morning’s apparent rain laid out before them, only a couple dozen metres before the hill rises rather sharply up, reaching a smooth peak well above the tree line. 

Newt locks the car, and the three of them begin their trek.

“Oh my god,  _ now  _ I remember,” Minho says, fond smile on his face, “We totally did come here to watch that meteor shower, back in - what, grade nine? Ten?”

“Summer before ten, I believe.”

Minho nods, rubbing his arms in the cold - well, it’s not  _ cold _ , per se, but it’s definitely not the Summer weather they’ve been used to, and Minho’s always been a warm-blooded creature. Newt glances up at the clouds, a menacingly dark grey, and prays that the rain waits until they’re done here. They look ready to burst.

They’re at the base of the hill when Minho breaks the silence again. “Remember when Teresa swore she saw a UFO but it ended up just being a plane?”

“I thought that was  _ you _ .”

“You thought that was - excuse me, I  _ know  _ what a  _ plane  _ looks like.”

“Mm, sure.”

He doesn’t protest any more after that, but turns to Sonya and tries and fails to whisper. “It was totally Teresa, his memory’s just shit.”

“‘Course, Min.”

Newt’s memory might be shit, but it’s good enough to know that it was definitely Minho who spotted the plane/UFO that night, gasping ostentatiously and demanding that everyone stop what they were doing (which was, ultimately, just lying there exactly like him) and check out his groundbreaking discovery. Newt’s even pretty sure that Teresa was the one that first suggested it was actually a plane, but he’ll let Minho believe whatever version of events he wants. 

There’s that bitter pang of guilt again, the one he’s been feeling for the past few weeks, ever since the whole thing at prom.  _ Teresa.  _ Newt - in his sweaty, just woken up frenzy - hadn’t even thought to text her when he’d forced Sonya into the car, taking them to Minho’s only ten minutes into his day. It’s not that he’d actively wanted to exclude her, it’s just that after nearly a month of avoiding her, she wasn’t the first person on his invite list.

And he rationalizes it to himself, like he always does. The last time she’d come to one of their investigative outings, she’d basically had some sort of god-given seizure. So she’s probably not all that eager to go chasing Newt’s latest and greatest. Plus, it was bound to rain, and she famously hates the rain - maybe the only thing she didn’t have in common with her brother, who would gladly go for a walk around town for the sole reason that there  _ was  _ rain falling - so she probably would have declined, anyway. There’s also the whole thing of it still being really awkward between them, having only exchanged a few stilted texts in the group chat since the incident occured - but whatever. Whatever. They’re already here, so there’s no use dwelling on it now. 

Newt has a dream to decipher.

They reach the top of the hill, rightfully winded, and Sonya collapses dramatically to the grass, clearly not caring about her clothes getting wet. Minho bends over, hands on his knees, and makes some comment Newt doesn’t hear about being out of shape even though the track season  _ just  _ ended. 

He doesn’t hear it because he is preoccupied. 

He is preoccupied, because he focusing very hard on Waiting To Feel Something. 

He’s not sure what he’s  _ supposed  _ to be feeling, but he’s pretty sure it’s not out of breath and annoyed at the wet grass sticking to his ankles.

Maybe it was stupid of him to come out here, to drag his sister and his friend along with him. What is he expecting to find, anyway? Thomas, hanging out in the grass like he hasn’t been a missing person for the past year? Newt’s not in a sci-fi or a YA novel, his dreams aren’t prophetic or any bullshit like that. They’re probably just his subconscious, playing some awful trick on him.

But then there’s that tug in the back corner of his mind, the one that sounds like Thomas. 

_ I’m right here.  _

“So, what are we looking for?” Minho asks, seemingly recovered from their mountain climbing adventure. Sonya sits up, and the two of them look at him expectantly - no skepticism, no doubt. Just ready to  _ look _ , whatever that means.

Newt swallows. “I’m not - I’m not sure, exactly,” he admits, rolling his tongue in his mouth. He’d explained his dream to the best of his ability to them in the car, but details had already slipped away from him.  _ Maybe I should start keeping a dream journal _ , he thinks absently to himself. 

“Okay, well - then let’s just look,” Sonya suggests, almost comically cheerful given the rather grim backdrop. She rolls back and then launches herself to her feet, making no move to wipe off the blades of wet grass sticking to the back of her legs. 

Minho shrugs. “Yeah, why not.” He starts off in a random direction without another word, but then turns back and gives Newt a wink. “Oh, let us know if you have any more epiphanies.”

If it was anyone but Minho, Newt might have taken offense. He does, however, wonder just how frenetic he’d really been at Minho’s door earlier that afternoon.

Maybe, when people at school hurriedly turned away after Newt met their unashamed-turned-ashamed stares, it wasn’t because he was the kid with the missing persons boyfriend.

Maybe it was just because he’d gone off the bloody rails, without even realizing it. 

He can’t blame them. He  _ is,  _ apparently, turning into a modern day Moses. But first, he has to earn his prophet status. And considering Thomas hasn’t magically materialized yet, it’s not looking so good. 

It’s been a couple minutes since Minho and Sonya wandered off when Newt realizes that he’s been so caught up in his own thoughts that he hasn’t even moved yet. 

“Anything over there?” he calls out to Sonya, and in return she gives him a look like she  _ wants  _ to say something like  _ no, Newt, this is just an empty hill _ , but she’s clearly trying to be polite so she just gives him an apologetic smile and a shake of the head.

He nods a thanks and then turns his attention in the other direction, to Minho who is currently staring very intently a specific patch of grass, transfixed. 

“Minho? Anything?”

His head snaps up and he blinks over at Newt, almost surprised to see him standing there. “No, not yet. Hey, you said-” he stops and scoffs, jogging over to Newt so he doesn’t have to yell. “You said that when - when he talked to you, it was always through, like, technology, right?”

“Yeah.”

Minho pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Well, then if he’s here, maybe he’ll give us a call.”

And, well, that’s an idea. Newt hums. He’s not entirely convinced that it’s going to be that easy, but he’s missed the sight of that self-satisfied smile on Minho’s face, so he gives him a pat on the shoulder. “Good idea.”

And then he’s off, back to roaming around the top of the hill holding his phone up to the sky, as if he’s trying to find reception. Actually, that’s not a bad idea - Newt pulls out his own phone to see if he has any bars this far out from town (as far as he knows, the next municipality isn’t for another half hour) and finds that he has no service. It strikes him as a little bit odd, distinctly remembering that Thomas had service to use his star finder app that night, but maybe the oncoming storm is messing with things. 

It’s funny, if Newt squints his eyes a little bit, Minho’s silhouette on the far side of the hill looks almost exactly like Thomas’ from that night, the both of them holding their phones to the sky, searching. He’s pretty sure he remembers thinking that night, that if he was a photographer he’d take a picture of Thomas in that pose, a human smudge on a backdrop of stars spilled across the sheet of dark blue, black trees framing the bottom edges of the shot. 

But now it’s a different landscape - it almost feels wrong, otherworldly, to see the scene like this, Minho fully visible (shoulders curled forward, permanent frown, exhaustion written on his skin) instead of just an anonymous form (anything, depending on what you wanted to see). It’s a different landscape and a different circumstance, a different world - a different  _ life.  _

Thomas’ absence had morphed into an entity of its own, a living being completely independent of his actual existence, breathing down Newt’s neck. It had replaced the space Thomas filled, insinuating its way into every facet of Newt’s life as if Thomas had never really been there at all, the lack of Thomas the only thing Newt could remember knowing. 

Forget delicate interstellar arrangements and boundless possibilities. The new normal is murky skies and searching eyes. 

And while it feels  _ wrong _ , wrong flowing through every vein in his body with every beat of his crumbling heart, it is his life, now. It is not an alternate world, nor a cruel dream. It is his life.

And yet, there is something about it that is unmistakably off-kilter.

Teetering.

He stands on the hill, feeling the world sway around him, just slightly.

The wind blows through the grass, noticeably unnoticeable on his skin.

The sky is dark and broiling, underbelly of the clouds burnt a deep green, almost black.

The ground is shaded, no moon to shed light on the blackness.

He feels it again - the sharp ache in his calves, the itch at the back of his throat. Electricity crackles through him and the feeling of  _ wrong  _ seeps into his bones once again.

Sonya wanders down the slope of the hill. Minho spins in a circle, holding his phone up to the gods. Newt stands still, waiting for the punishment he knows will come.

And then, there is a flash so bright he thinks for one second that god himself has personally come down to smite him - for breaking the statue, for letting Thomas get lost, for fighting with Teresa, for making everyone leave, for being an awful person - and then the tableau turns sideways, Newt smacking his head on the ground just in time for him to see Minho crumble into a lifeless heap.

Next, there is a Sonya flavoured scream ringing from very, very far away, and smoke begins to rise off of Minho in thin plumes, snaking into the sky, now dark once again. Newt pushes himself upright, head like water sloshing thickly against the edges of a tank. 

The next five minutes of his life happen in slow motion. 

Sonya appears from behind him, stumbling as she hurtles to a stop, panic flushing to a second of blank relief as she realizes that he is breathing and conscious. She nearly melts before tensing again, Newt mouthing a weak  _ go  _ as she takes off again, this time past Newt toward Minho, who still hasn’t moved in the twenty (seconds? minutes? years?) since he hit the ground.

At some point Newt rises shakily to his feet, legs screaming in protest as he surges forward, one step after another. One moment he is trudging through knee deep water and the next he is walking on air, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. For a moment, the sky flashes dark blue and Thomas waits only a few feet away, their hands coming together, speckled by starlight.

And then he is back in the water, falling as the conduction of the current still crackling in the air brings him to his knees. His hands are no longer painted in the cosmos but covered in dirt, feeling frantically for a pulse in the wrist of his best friend, the smell of burning choking him as he leans in close and prays for the cool exhale of a telltale breath from Minho’s open mouth.

It is weak, but the pulse is there.

_ “Okay, so I know you’re never able to find it, but - polaris? Polaris is right there, and over here are the pleiades. The seven sisters. Between polaris and the pleiades is perseus, which is where all the meteors are gonna be coming from.” _

Sonya’s lips move like she is saying something, but the only sound that reaches Newt’s ears is sharp, silvery ringing.

_ “Do all constellation names start with a P?” _

_ He laughs softly at the question, and it sounds like the voice of the cosmos themselves. “Polaris isn’t a constellation, babe.” _

Minho continues to lie there, offering not a single sign that he is alive other than the thin pulse still held in Newt’s fingers, clutching it like it might disappear if he lets go. His face is so pale it looks like it could be bathed in moonlight. 

_ Fog begins to roll up the hill, like the ocean lapping softly at the edges of an island. “Oh, now that’s romantic. They must know I’m here.” _

_ “Who?” _

_ “The angels.” _

Sonya grabs his face and speaks again, quick and urgent and just barely reaching him, her voice a million miles away:

“Newt, I need you to be  _ here _ .”

(It’s something she says when he really spirals into himself, a grounding system she’d figured out after his first panic attack at the tender age of eleven years old, when he’d “gone away” in his own head for a full five minutes without even realizing she was there with him.)

_ “Ever consider they have more important things to do than provide you with the perfect meteor shower watching ambiance?” _

_ “Actually, no, I happen to know that me and my  _ ambiance  _ are among their top priorities.” _

_ “Oh, of course.” _

_ There is a beat, a thumb rubbed across a palm, and a small frown. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk about them so much.” _

_ The response is immediate: “No, no. You like them, and I like hearing you talk about the things you like.” _

_ “Okay. Still - I know it can be-” A sigh, and then a small, unknown smile. “Still, I’m sorry.” _

Thomas’ voice, past and present and surrounding and suffocating:  _ I’m sorry.  _ There are a few strained utterances of  _ I don’t think I can save her _ and  _ find me _ , accompanied by the constant  _ sorry _ , consuming him on the hill in the world that is both light and dark in the same moment, fluctuating and existing both between and somewhere else entirely. Newt feels his throat begin to close, an invisible hand clasping around his windpipe and feeling not one ounce of mercy on this day. Daggers of light begin to cross in his vision and he cannot tell if it is a production of his own oxygen-deprived brain or more lightning scorching the earth around them. There is one last  _ I’m sorry  _ ripping through the air and Newt accepts that he is not going to be conscious very soon, and as his eyes flash to a divine white he hears it:

Minho gasps to life, mouth sputtering and eyes fluttering and pulse poundly erratically in Newt’s grasp, the one he forgot he held as the both of them come back to life, back to the  _ here _ that is their burning world, back in real-time and real, visceral terror.

Newt snaps out of his dark reverie and Sonya catches the switch immediately, face hardening through the breathless relief of Minho being  _ alive _ .

“You’re the only person that can drive, so I need you to be here and  _ stay _ here, right now.”

And then, it’s all business. He attributes it to shock, but they manage to maneuver Minho onto the picnic blanket stuffed in Sonya’s backpack, awkwardly dragging him sideways down the hill, trying not to break an ankle or send him shooting like a ten year old down a slip-n-slide on the slick grass.

The journey across the flat stretch - the last obstacle before they reach the car - is when Newt realizes that there are sounds other than the high pitched ringing, most notably in the form of Minho’s low, sluggish groans each time they hit a bump with their makeshift stretcher.

Somehow they are able to lift him off the ground and into the back seat of the car - Sonya a quarter of an inch off five foot one and Newt averaging in at a meal and a half per day, the both of them thin as twigs - by grace of god finding an inkling of strength pooled collectively between the two of them. 

Newt starts driving back toward town, but Sonya stops him at the intersection with the turnoff for the city - for the nearest hospital. 

“No, wait,” she says. Newt’s response time is a second or two delayed, the car screeching to a halt in the middle of the road. Everyone hits the back of their seat, and Sonya continues without missing a beat. “Go to town. And christ, get out of the intersection, we don’t need to get in an accident, too.”

He is about to protest but sees her hold up a finger in the rearview mirror, phone thrust to her ear. Against everything telling him to head to the city, he makes the turn to head back into town and waits for his sister to explain herself.

“Teresa? Minho got struck by lightning. Is your mom at home or at work right now?” There is only a second of delay where Newt can think  _ of course _ before Sonya exhales. “Okay, we’re coming over.” She gives Newt a thumbs up, signalling him to keep going to town, to Teresa’s house. “Yeah, yea- hi, Mrs. Murphy. Yes, he’s breathing and he’s awake - no, only a minute or two. Yeah, he’s pretty out of it. Okay, okay. We’re like ten minutes out. No, I’ll - yeah, no, I’ll make sure he drives safe. I know. Thank you, Mrs. Murphy.”

Newt doesn’t know how she’s so calm. Hell, not just that but  _ competent,  _ realizing in a second what Newt is only remembering now - that Teresa’s mom has Thursdays off, and that their house is a good forty minutes closer than the hospital.

And that’s a forty minutes that Minho might desperately need. 

The next half an hour is a blur. Newt vaguely recalls pulling into their driveway, Teresa and her parents already waiting on the porch, Teresa looking ready to throw up and her mom and dad looking ready to jump into action, medical gloves and all. The three of them immediately get Minho out of the car, transporting him on a backboard into Mr. Murphy’s office (one perk of having a doctor for a mom - an abundance of advanced first aid equipment collecting dust in the garage).

Next he is sitting on the living room couch, sandwiched between Sonya and Teresa on either side. Sonya had spent the first two minutes in the house explaining everything that happened out on the hill, giving Mrs. Murphy the full picture. Apparently, Teresa had already briefed her mom on Minho’s past medical mishaps (not much, just some stitches on his knee from a track accident last year and a recent tendency to overdo it while drinking) and so it was right to work after that, Teresa’s parents banishing the three of them to the living room so they could provide Minho with proper care, sans blubbering distraction. 

Teresa is nearly as white as Minho, but takes charge of the three of them anyway.

“She told me to treat you guys for shock, so.” She unceremoniously drapes a blanket over their shoulders, pulling it snug around their necks. Sonya leans into Newt’s shoulder. 

Somehow, Newt finds it in the empty cavity of himself to be indignant. “We’re not in  _ shock _ , Teresa.” 

She looks at him like he is the stupidest person alive. “Your breathing is shallow, hers is shallow and irregular. Both of you look like shit, you’re sweaty and pale and your pupils are shot. Congratulations, you’re in shock  _ and  _ you’re an asshole.”

“I’m sorry,” he says immediately, burying his face in the blanket.  _ Bloody hell, maybe  _ I  _ should’ve been the one struck by lightning. _

“It’s fine,” she says, more tired than anything. “You just need to relax. How’s your hearing now?”

Newt blinks and wonders if he missed the part of the conversation where Sonya told any of them about his hearing getting messed up. The ringing is still there, but otherwise it appears that he’s regained all normal function.

“Dude, you were ten feet away from a lightning strike, even I know you’re gonna have some sort of temporary hearing loss.” She sits down beside him and lowers her voice. “If this is a money thing, like you think you won’t be able to afford getting it treated-”

“I can hear just fine.”

She doesn’t look convinced. Sonya pipes up, softly. “He could hear me fine in the car.”

“Yeah. It’s just ringing a bit,” he adds, and then Teresa gives an annoyed sigh.

“Fine. But - the two of you are definitely coming to the hospital to get checked out for sure after.”

“Fine.”

After that they are silent for a while. The only sound is the muffled sniffling of Sonya, who has finally begun to cry after being the stronghold of the whole ordeal. Newt has no idea how much time has passed since Teresa’s parents had forced them out of the room - and he’s not sure he wants to know. The longer Minho spends in there, the worse it is, right?

Newt’s not sure he can take losing anyone else right now, and especially not if it’s Minho. He doesn’t know much about lightning strikes, or what it takes to survive them, but he’s never seen anything Minho can’t survive. If he got the chance, he’d probably run right back up to that hill just as an extra  _ fuck you, I survived _ to the storm itself.

It is some time - a few seconds, a few minutes, an eternity - later when Teresa clears her throat quietly, and speaks to Newt while still staring at the wall.

“They must have known you were there.”

He takes a second to process before he concludes, “They’re angry.”

She turns to him finally, nodding with the saddest smile he’s ever seen. “Yeah, I think they are.”

 

Later, the door to the office opens and a pale, shaky Minho wobbles out into the living room.

“Hey, guys.”

 

(They all cram into the Murphy minivan for an evening of scans and orange popsicles at the hospital. As soon as they hit the open road outside of town, the sky finally tears open, an entire ocean’s worth of rain pouring down as if weeping for what it had done to them. Newt expects to see a frown or a grimace on Teresa’s face, but when he looks over there is instead a tiny, melancholic smile, and a single tear making its way slowly down her cheek.)

 

Every muscle, joint, and bone in Newt’s body aches when he gets up the next morning. Aside from the actual physical trauma of it all - his head still feels like it’s filled with cotton - he is exhausted emotionally, and there is still one thing bugging him about yesterday - well, there are still  _ many  _ things bugging him about yesterday, an endless list of questions swirling anew in his brain, but there is one thing in particular:

_ They must have known you were there. _

Teresa’s words were much too familiar, much too similar to Thomas, from that night: 

_ They must know I’m here. _

It can’t just be a coincidence, right? Was Teresa just missing Thomas more than usual and adopting one of his phrases as a way of trying to feel closer to him? Newt can’t remember her ever saying anything like that before, unless-

Unless, his brain isn’t able to process this much this early. All he knows is that Teresa used almost the exact same wording as Thomas did while talking about the angels and that feels very ooky spooky for whatever reason. And this morning, he’s gonna have to settle for ooky spooky.

In the afternoon, he’s still thinking about what it could mean (if it even means  _ anything _ ) when Sonya knocks on his door.

“Think Minho’s up for a visit?”

 

They show up on his doorstep with their arms full, Sonya holding a milk crate full of flowers and veggies, Newt cradling a pile of assorted DVDs. He’s surprised when it’s Minho that answers the door instead of his mother; he seems to be up and walking a lot more fine than Newt was expecting. Which is, well, at least  _ one  _ good thing.

Because visually, there’s not much else good.

Curling up the side of his neck and along his jaw there are reddish-brown marks seared into his skin, like tiny tree branches but a thousand times more intricate. There are deep bags under his eyes, purple undertones showing through just enough so that he looks like he got in a fight. Neither Newt nor Sonya are able to stop themselves from gaping.

“Oh, yeah, I know. It looks pretty gnarly,” Minho explains, turning around and lifting his shirt to expose his back - the branches converge in a deeper, darker figure on the left side of his back that snakes upwards and around to the front of his neck. “Doesn’t hurt, though. The doctors said it’ll probably fade in a month or so.”

It takes a second for Newt to regain the power of speech. “We were wondering if maybe you were up for a visit.”

Minho looks confused. “You were - oh, yeah, I can’t really hear anything out of this ear so you’re gonna have to like, yell a bit. Sorry.”

_ Sorry.  _ Newt almost laughs - Minho was as stubborn as they came, refusing to apologize for just about anything and everything. But now, for an outcome of a situation that was pretty much entirely Newt’s fault, he was readily -  _ preemptively _ \- apologizing.

Ridiculous. It’s ridiculous, and it makes Newt’s heart hurt.

Sonya speaks up, voice so loud they could probably hear it across the street. “We brought movies.”

She tilts her head to Newt and he takes that as his cue to display the aforementioned movies, lifting them up in the stupidest way imaginable as his elbows work valiantly to not let any of them fall to the ground. His efforts are in vain because he ends up losing both  _ Ratatouille  _ and  _ Grease  _ to gravity, but the smile that lights up Minho’s face is worth it.

 

They end up curled together on Minho’s bed watching  _ A New Hope _ and eating pretzels. It is, for the two hours that it lasts, incredibly normal. It feels like True Summer - the three of them sprawled out in their not-dress-code-appropriate shorts without a single thought of homework or tests or what middle-aged catholic school teachers decide it is their duty to deem  _ appropriate.  _ Eating snacks, and watching a movie they’ve already seen dozens of times, they are normal, lazy teenagers. Perhaps the only thing that is off is the fact that they are slightly cold, air conditioning cooling the house with a vengeance - the only kind of Summer Newt’s had is one that is accompanied by a constant layer of sweat and a dull headache, only cured (and then only momentarily) by sticking a head in the freezer and inhaling deeply, an icy shock to the lungs. 

Lying there, nibbling on the end of his seventh pretzel stick like some sort of oversized hamster, Newt feels so normal in that moment that it feels  _ wrong,  _ like there should be some impending catastrophe hanging onto the edge of his vision at all times, like in some cosmic way he shouldn’t be allowed to just hang out with his best friend and sister and leave it at that.

But then Minho reaches for the remote and turns up the volume to a near-deafening level, a look of quiet frustration on his face, and Newt remembers exactly why they are there, pretending to be normal, lazy teenagers for the afternoon. 

  
  


Their world, for a short period of time, is a little quieter after that day.

 

He starts teaching Sonya how to drive. There is a small part of him that is annoyed when she’s immediately great at it, but for the most part he is glad that she doesn’t have to go through the horror that was learning to drive with their dad. His teaching style was more yelling than anything else, accentuated with long, disappointed pauses peppered with cursing under his breath. 

(A younger version of himself sits in an empty parking lot, on the verge of tears. “I don’t know why you’re making me do this now, I can’t even get my learner’s permit for another two years.”  
“You have to start learning now so that you’re ready when the time comes.”

“But  _ Dad _ -”

“No more of that. Back into that parking spot, and this time remember to use the bloody mirrors.”)

They start out in that same parking lot, the one for the out-of-use train station the next town over. Newt feels incredibly out of place sitting in the passenger seat, a feeling that’s only augmented by seeing his baby sister in the driver’s spot. 

He gives her the tips he’s amassed over the years, like that when you’re steering it helps if you look where you want to go or that you should always check your mirrors before you make an abrupt stop because while yes, technically, it’s always the other person’s fault if  _ they  _ rear end  _ you,  _ it helps to know that you’re not gonna be pissing anyone off or putting yourself in more danger if you’re trying not to hit a squirrel. These are things that their dad never told him and each one is like a little  _ take that, dad _ as he makes sure that Sonya’s learning experience is as different as possible from his. 

Soon enough she’s ready to take on the residential streets, and the excited smile that takes over her face as she makes it through her very first stoplight catastrophe free - and  _ tear free _ , much unlike Newt and his screaming dad - it is all he needs to feel like a competent brother again. Once he takes her to write her test in the city (much like Minho’s mom did for him, bless her soul) she’ll have her learner’s, and then after that she’ll do her in-car test.

He realizes, as he sticks his arm out the window on a particularly sweaty morning session, one of their first on the 80kph roads outside of town, that he is going to have to start sharing the car once Sonya gets her full license.

Somehow, he decides, over the sound of impassioned singing along to the Taylor Swift CD blasting out of the speakers, Newt doesn’t mind one bit. 

 

A few weeks after the incident, Newt notices a persistent aching in his calves and forearms, like a strange kind of soreness despite having done next to no physical activity since their arduous climb and subsequent rush down the hill. It’s definitely not leftover strain from anything on that day, because the bruise on his shoulder from getting thrown to the ground had faded a week prior. 

With it comes an oddly familiar, oddly sharp tingling that he tries his best to ignore, given the fact that no matter if its serious or not, there was no way in hell he’d be able to afford a doctor to look at it. And Teresa’s mom wasn’t an option either - she’d done enough for him and asking for more, especially after everything that had happened in the last year, just felt like taking advantage of her kindness. 

It doesn’t help that he hasn’t seen Teresa since the incident, either. He’d planned to ask her about what she’d said after they got home from watching Star Wars at Minho’s that night, but something had stopped him then, and had continued to stop him every time he thought about it since. Every time he repeated the words in his head, an eerie feeling seeped deep into his bones and did not leave for the rest of the day.

So, he ignores his calves and his arms and his bones and pretends that he is on good terms with his friend who is starting to say all the cryptic things his missing boyfriend used to say. 

Newt thinks that he is getting really good at ignoring things.

Really, he was just always good at ignoring things, better than he realizes even now.

He spends a lot of his time sitting on his bed, staring at the wall as if the mass of sticky notes contains some sort of answer. It might have been useful if Thomas had put them up in some kind of order, but of course that’s not the case. It started out with him picking random spots on the two walls bracketing Newt’s bed, and despite having done it for nearly four years Thomas never developed something even resembling a system. 

When they were thirteen, his walls were empty.

It was their year-end project for grade seven religion class - yes, religion class; small town with exactly one (1) middle school/high school hybrid that unsurprisingly happened to be a catholic one - and they were sitting cross-legged on Newt’s bed, knees almost touching. 

(Back then, he chalked up his fluttering heart to  _ anxiety _ , that fancy new word the woman he’d seen a couple months back and never again had named his stuttering breaths and general sense of unease.)

Thomas’ binder was covered in lime green sticky notes, each one with a different name written in all-caps with a thick black sharpie. After two entire minutes - Newt was watching the clock so that he wouldn’t watch Thomas - he nodded with finality and grabbed one of the green squares, pressing it firmly onto the wall beside him.

“John the Baptist,” he said, “that’s the one.”

The project, in all its vagueness, was to pick a significant religious figure and give a five minute presentation on them, in pairs. The only religious figure that Newt could confidently name was Jesus, so he had no issue with Thomas taking the reins on their project. “Alright,” he said. There was a moment of silence and then he turned his attention to the wall, taking in the new decor. “Thanks for the, uh, new poster, Tommy.”

“If you ever take it down we can’t be friends anymore.”

(Four years later, it is still there at the centre of the hurricane adorning his walls.)

The next time Thomas was over, he’d gotten this funny little smile on his face when he noticed the note was still there. And from that day on, he’d made it a tradition to leave something on the wall everytime he was in the room. At the start it was a lot of nonsense, just to confuse Newt or make him laugh. There were a few doodles, and some inside jokes. It didn’t take long for the collection to grow, sticky notes of steadily increasing variation in both colour and size, a mosaic of reasons for Newt to smile every time he so much as turned his head. 

It was an amalgamation of things that led to the notes carrying more meaning than poorly drawn smiley faces and quotes from Minho. There was the onset of everything that Newt collectively calls his Hell Brain TM , that one very long-time coming late night epiphany about his sexuality, and his dad disappearing out of the blue. It all happened inside of about a year, and the stress of it all was obviously not as well-hidden as Newt had thought. Or maybe Thomas was a little more observant than Newt gave him credit for.

Either way, back when just about everything in his life was new and sharp and scary, there was a sleeve rolled up too high followed by a lame excuse. A couple days later, after a Saturday night spent with him, Thomas, and Teresa all crammed hip-to-hip in Newt’s bed watching  _ Grey’s Anatomy,  _ (with the latter two pointing out inaccuracies every three seconds, nearly insufferable) there was a new sticky note stuck down low, right beside where his head lay on his pillow:  _ i’m here for you,  _ it read.

And he was. 

And maybe, somewhere, he still is.

Staring at the wall, Newt waits. There have been times in the past year where he’s felt Thomas’ presence, like someone is watching him in an empty room. It feels like nothing in particular except a very specific, very tangible  _ thereness  _ that cannot be mistaken for anything else but  _ him.  _ It is these times that Newt can very nearly feel Thomas’ shoulder pressed into his, can almost hear the unique rhythm of his breathing, inhales just a beat quicker than the exhales. 

But now, ruminating in smell of stale sharpie and the sound of fingers run over curling paper edges, Newt feels nothing in particular but a very specific, very tangible  _ absence _ . His eyes search for a pattern in the collage of colours, going in and out of focus as he tries to parse some bigger meaning out of a thousand smaller, separate ones. 

There are no shapes in the colours, no numbers hidden in the forms of the words. It is just chaos among the traces of Thomas. He is everywhere but Newt still can’t find him, not even the foggiest on where to begin.

Two days later, he decides to begin anyway, creating his own chaos on the wall opposite the sticky notes.

It starts with a trip to the dollar store. His supplies include one (1) variety package of coloured string, two (2) rolls of tape, one (1) package of multicoloured tacks, and one (1) package of printer paper. He spends the first half of the evening printing and cutting articles and pictures, amassing two piles on the floor on either side of him, one a neat stack of varying sizes of paper and the other a haphazard mess of scraps. By the time dinner rolls around, he is ready to start pinning things to the wall. But of course, then it’s actually dinner and Sonya is bugging him to come eat something, so he puts the chaos on hold. 

“Christ, Newt, what were you  _ doing _ ?” Sonya demands from down the hall, Newt mid-spoonful of cereal. He tilts his head to look down the hall and sees Sonya standing at his open doorway, confused and slightly concerned expression on her face, surely matching his. 

Then he remembers the hurricane of paper on his bedroom floor.

“Oh, I was, erm, doing a thing.”

“You were doing a thing?”

He sighs. “Yeah, like.  _ Ugh _ .” Now that he’s about to say it out loud, it feels really, really stupid. “You know in, like, crime shows or whatever, when they do the board with all the shit and the string?”

Sonya brightens up. “Oh,  _ yeah! _ ”

“Yeah, I was thinking of maybe trying to do one of those. For - with everything we know for Tommy.”

For just a second she looks surprised, and Newt bites his lip. The investigating had mostly been on hold since Minho got struck by lightning, and they hadn’t yet discussed anything about starting back up again. He realizes that other people, his sister included, may not have Thomas and Finding Thomas on their mind at any and all moments of both day and night. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought it up around her so soon; maybe she’d think he was being insensitive for wanting to get back into it so soon after Minho almost died, or maybe-

“That’s a great idea, Newt,” she says suddenly, smile a little bit sadder than he was used to seeing. But it only lasts a second before her resolve hardens, determination on her face as she strides down the hall. “Really - so much has happened since - since - and we haven’t really been keeping track of the messages or stuff with the statue or anything, and since Minho - we have some down time so it would be great to use that to regroup.”

Newt swallows the last of his Froot Loops, smiling. 

“And maybe now that we can take a bit of a step back, things will, like, connect, or something. Like how you realized the thing about the phones after Teresa fixed yours that one time.  _ Or- _ ” she gasps excitedly, taking Newt’s bowl without even asking and dumping it in the sink, running the hot water to do the dishes. She rambles on as each idea comes to mind and directly through to her mouth, accent coming in a bit more strongly in her unmonitored speech. “What about - okay, I know I was mad at you about this and I still kind of am because you were a real prick, but what she was said at prom? About the second message? That was a little weird. She didn’t even wanna talk about it that much to  _ me  _ afterwards.”

“Woah, hold on - when did  _ you  _ talk to Teresa about what happened at prom?”

Sonya shrinks suddenly, blinking rapidly. “Oh, uh, yeah, that’s kind of a long story. Not important.” She squirts a generous amount of dish soap into the sink, not meeting Newt’s questioning gaze. She obviously doesn’t want to talk about it so he doesn’t press it further, at least not then. After a second she lets out a loud sigh.

“Anyway,” she says, voice coming up at the end. It hangs in the air for a second and then she smiles slyly, eyes coming up to meet Newt’s once more. “We’re gonna need to find some red string.”

“Already done.”

The package of string may have cost $1.50, but the smile on her face in that moment is absolutely priceless.

 

A couple of hours and a lot of tape later, the Thomas Disappearance Conspiracy Wall is finished. It spans almost the entire length of the wall opposite his bed, and despite the mess on the floor, the actual arrangement of things on the wall is decently neat, or at least much neater than Newt had been expecting it to turn out. 

There’s somewhat of a system to it, thanks to Sonya. On the right edge, there are pictures of various angels, some of them Thomas’ sketches and some of them from google, all with various combinations of swords and scales, just like their statue in the forest. Underneath the pictures are short descriptions of what religion they supposedly belong to, or hints as to how they might be related to their angel. Wrapped around the tack holding the photo of their actual statue is a piece of red string leading to a picture of Teresa, the words  _ fainting?  _ and  _ seizure??!?  _ written underneath, as well as the exact date of the day back in Winter when she’d touched the statue.

Also connected to Teresa is a piece of paper with Thomas’ second message -  _ I’m sorry. I don’t think I can save her, _ and the date Newt got that call in the seven eleven parking lot. Stemming out from that is another string, leading to a blank piece of paper with red question marks all over it: if Teresa was so convinced that the  _ her  _ Thomas was talking about wasn’t, well,  _ her _ , then who was it? 

Then, connected to  _ that  _ was two separate branches, one with Thomas’ first message ( _ find me _ ) plus the date, and a whole cluster of research Sonya had dug up on anomalies in radio signals and cell phone towers in their area. Then, beside that, a piece of paper with a rough timeline of all the times Newt could remember Thomas or Teresa coming into school with a new phone, or whenever Thomas had a new radio clock on his bedside table. 

On the opposite side of all that is a picture of Minho and a picture of the hill, and some paper with bullet points summarizing the incident surrounded by a number of question marks. Underneath, in red pen, Newt had written both what Thomas had said to him when they went to watch the meteor shower and what Teresa had said in their living room that day. 

Circling in closer to the centre of the whole thing are two short newspaper clippings, nearly obscured by the web of string. One is from when Thomas first went missing, a section of the front page of their town’s newspaper. It had his school picture from grade ten - the same one that had haunted Newt’s facebook feed for almost the entirety of first semester - and the headline  _ PROVIDENCE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT MISSING,  _ followed by a couple paragraphs about Thomas and how readers could help in the search to locate him. 

(Sometimes, in the thick of all the divine messages and the invisible presences, Newt almost forgets that Thomas is actually a missing person. His stomach churns.)

The second newspaper clipping is from an ad that Thomas’ parents took out,  à la  _ Gone Girl,  _ with a more recent picture of him and a phone number to call should anyone have any leads on where their son might be. 

The very left side of the mosaic houses a cluster of scans from the book Thomas left for Newt - the one he still hadn’t finished going through yet,  _ couldn’t  _ yet - with anything that seemed like it might have been the same brand of cryptic as all the other sketchy quotes they had up on the wall. There are also a few sketches, mostly of the statue but some of random figures, but written in Thomas’ messy scrawl is the contender for most promising item:  _ “she’s there watching over me, over us.” _ Again, the ever-elusive  _ she. _

There is only one string running from this group, and it connects to the one at the centre of it all: Thomas. It’s a photo of him, taken at the start of last Summer when Teresa was on the last legs of her photography phase. Newt remembers the moment it was taken, almost freakishly well:

It was a hot day, much too hot for June, so they’d all piled into Newt’s shitty station wagon and gone out to the lake an hour or so out of town and spent the day swimming, hiking, and getting properly sunburnt despite the excess of sunscreen piled onto their skin every hour on the hour. Once they were sufficiently tuckered out, they headed home, stopping on the way at a diner the next town over for dinner. The sun had set by the time they reached Thomas and Teresa’s house, the four of them setting up camp in the basement, DVDs sprawled across the floor.

“I really feel like  _ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off _ is the mood for tonight, guys,” Minho said. Newt nodded robotically, not really caring what they put on, as long as Thomas was curled up to his side in the next ten minutes, he’d be fine with anything.

“Newt’s on board!”

“I’m good with  _ Ferris Bueller _ ,” Teresa said, also not paying attention as she scrolled through the day’s photos on her camera, smile on her face illuminated in the light of the screen. “Tom?”

Thomas sat up on the couch, typing away almost furiously on his laptop, only tearing his eyes away when Teresa called his name again. “Yeah, yeah, sorry. I’m just working on something, give me one second.”

Minho scoffed. “Dude, school’s over. Turn off whatever nerd shit you’re doing and watch a movie with your friends.”

Thomas’ reaction was just slightly delayed, and when he looked up, Teresa had her camera at the ready.

It happened in an instant, his face a perfect mixture of amused and offended as Teresa snapped the photo, flash going off brightly in the dark room. Thomas scoffed and mumbled something about Minho’s taste in movies and then Teresa giggled, clapping a hand over her mouth.

Thomas’ glare was instant. “Let me see.”

“No way.”

“Reese, come on.” Thomas closed his laptop and moved to get up from the couch, but Teresa was already halfway across the room, bouncing on her toes as if ready to deke her brother out at a moment’s notice. 

Suddenly, the room was like a live wire. Thomas’ calf twitched and Newt and Minho were up in a second, the latter running to snicker over Teresa’s shoulder and the former barreling toward Thomas with his arms open, crushing him in the meanest of hugs.

“Hey, Tommy,” he said fake sweetly, nearly tripping over Thomas’ struggling feet as he dragged the two of them back toward the couch. 

“ _ Newt, _ ” he whined, “Come on, I thought you loved me.”

At the same time, from across the room, there were tandem giggles turning into full blown laughter. Minho called out, “Thomas, you look  _ adorable _ .”

“Tommy, Tommy, let’s sit down, you must be  _ so tired from our big day _ -”

“Teresa Agnes Murphy, I swear to god-”

“Wow, you swear at god? That’s pretty hardcore, Tom.”

“ _ Ugh _ .”

“You actually do look cute, though.”

Thomas sighed in defeat and leaned back into Newt’s chest, blowing some angry air from his nostrils when Newt kissed him on the cheek. 

He stifled a laugh and then spoke quietly, just for the two of them. “Oh, come on now. I bet you look adorable.” 

Thomas huffed another sigh. “Hm.”

Then, Teresa: “Can we come back now or are you gonna attack us?”

He took a moment to seriously consider. “Fine. But you have to make the popcorn, I’m not moving,” he said, taking Newt’s wrists and pulling his arms tighter around his waist. Newt happily complied, pulling his leg out and hitching it on top of Thomas’ thigh so that he was sitting on the couch and not Newt’s lap. 

“Ugh, fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. She nodded toward the tangle of their limbs on the couch. “Disgusting,” she declared, snapping another picture at lightning speed anyway. Minho burst out into laughter once more as Thomas nearly surged forward, Newt pulling him back at the last second with the absolute fondest of squeezes. 

(Later, once the popcorn had been made and the movie had been put on, Teresa balanced her camera on Thomas’ shoulder, silently smiling as she showed Newt the picture that had caused so much commotion. 

He’d changed it to his contact picture for him the very next morning.)

It is still the photo that stares back at Newt every time he opens up his iMessage conversation with Thomas, the last grey bubble dated almost exactly a year ago.

And it is the photo that stares back at him now from its spot on the wall, red strings spreading out like fingers from every edge, reaching out to everywhere and nowhere all at once, reaching for a sign, for  _ something,  _ just - reaching.

Newt hasn’t been in their basement since last Summer but the texture of the couch in the photo brings back visceral memories, almost like he’s there again, Thomas in his arms. Pretty much everything else in the picture brings all Newt’s nostalgic tendencies bubbling up to the surface as well, like the tiny row of star stickers on his laptop, (arranged in order in pink, purple, and blue; about as much pride as he could get away with at school in a town this small) or the visible smudges on his glasses in the whitish green squares from his screen reflecting off the lenses. He was always -  _ always  _ \- cleaning them, but somehow the smudges still remained. 

Newt can’t help but search this photo for clues just as he had the sticky notes. It was taken less than two months before he disappeared, so he  _ had _ to have been showing signs of - of, well,  _ something _ , even if Newt hadn’t realized at the time. 

He knows that he is going down a very dangerous path, one that he has trodden many times before: he convinces himself that if he’d looked a little closer, he could have realized something was wrong and done something about it, before it was too late. The feeling hits him especially heavy tonight, with the past couple months of realizing that he is not as attentive a friend as he once thought piling up very quickly. 

But the photo tells him nothing. It stays tacked to the wall, eye of the hurricane of string, tacks, and paper. 

Sonya snaps her fingers a couple of inches away from his face and he blinks, realizing that he is teetering forwards into the wall.   
“Newt, you there?”

He tears his eyes away, blinking hard. “Shit, yeah, sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she says, giving him a small smile. “I, uh - I was just gonna say, have you talked to Teresa lately?”

_ No.  _ “Yeah, I suppose,” he lies, a pang of guilt going through him. “Why?”

Sonya bites her lips as if she’s gearing up for something. “I don’t know,” she starts, walking over to Newt’s bed and flopping down, crossing her legs. “I just - I was over there yesterday and it seemed like she wasn’t... doing great, y’know?” She finally meets his gaze, face cautious. “Maybe you should check in on her sometime this week?”

Unshockingly, he suddenly feels like a dick. “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” he says, getting a little exhausted of feeling like this all of the time. Then his brain supplies him with the memory of how, back in the early days, Teresa would always send him a new song whenever he had a particularly bad day at school, and he feels even worse. “Tomorrow,” he decides, “I’ll stop by after my shift tomorrow morning.”

Sonya smiles. “Great. I think she’d really appreciate that, Newt.”

He remembers that he is trying, and that that is what counts, and smiles back.

 

The next day, Newt arrives at the library bright early with a bit of a bounce in his step. It wasn’t as hard to drag himself out of bed that morning, and he did so with a notably clearer head than normal - the power of organization, he supposes. He picks up Harriet and drops her and Sonya off at Aris’ on his way to work, arriving a whopping total of twenty-five minutes before his shift - and an  _ opening  _ shift, no less. That has to be some kind of record.

He gets there before Mary, and spends an entire ten minutes in solitude just walking up and down the stacks, running his fingers over the spines of the books. There are two carts of reshelving to take care of, most likely neglected last night by that second-rate new hire that was in Sonya’s grade, but Newt doesn’t even care. It’s tedious work, but if he’s being honest with himself, he kind of likes the reshelving. 

The air conditioning is working spectacularly. There are no annoyed parents waiting at the door with whining children that Newt has to pretend not to notice. It’s his shortest shift of the week, and he’ll finally get to see Teresa after he’s done here.

Today, Newt decides, is a good day.

He decides it, but that does not make it true.

When his shift is almost over, his good mood manages to spill over into the part of his brain that works on its own accord.

“Mary, did you know my mother?”

The question takes both of them off guard, and Newt almost scrambles to backtrack but she recovers quickly, putting on a small smile.

“Yes, I did. A lovely woman,” she says, eyes faraway. She blinks and then Newt nods slightly, urging her to go on. He’s not sure where the question came from - or how he knew, somewhere deep inside of him, that she’d say yes - but now it’s the only thing he cares about, the quiet chatter of the library fading even further into the background. 

She continues fondly. “You would have been too young to remember, but she’d bring you in with her, actually. Quite the reader, just like you. I’d see her in here almost every day - ‘what do we have today, Beth?’ I’d ask her.” She pauses, laughing quietly to herself. She is such a storyteller in the way that her memories feel tangible even to Newt, as if he could reach out and feel the fondness of the moment just by grabbing her hand. He is so caught up in the instant obsession of the possibility of people knowing his own mother better than him that he misses one very crucial detail. 

“Each time it was something different. Eventually, after a couple of weeks she just sat down and we started talking. About you, about the baby - she was pregnant with your sister, at the time - and she was, oh what was it that she always said? I don’t know if you know this but she was a very spiritual woman, your mother… Oh, that’s it! ‘Angels are watching over me.’ That’s what she’d say, all the time.”

Newt’s mouth goes dry. “Angels?”

“Yes, like I said, Beth was very spiritual - said she could hear them talking to her all the time. The angels, that is. In fact, I think she even read some of the same books you have here, Newt. The two of you are a lot more alike than you know.”

There is so, so much, but his brain doesn’t get further than the first sentence. 

“I’m sorry, what - what did you - what did you call my mother?”

Mary looks confused. “What did I - oh, Beth. That’s what she went by, your mom.”

His brain splits like a dichotomy, two simultaneous memories ripping through his consciousness- 

The first one is so blurry and vague he’s not even sure he can call it a true memory, but the words are burned into his brain all the same, his dad’s voice booming through the thin walls of the house: “ _ Christ _ , Liz, it’s like you’re not even here sometimes!”

The second is almost forgotten, on the fringes of his ability to recall. It is dark and shrouded in softness, Thomas’ voice low and urgent, muffled by unsettled sleep: “ _ Beth _ .”

Then the rest of Mary’s words process, and another memory - a mantra, at this point - rushes to the forefront of his mind.

_ I’m sorry. I don’t think I can save her. _

He stops breathing as the world comes to a halt. It all starts to come together: the messages, the angels, Teresa’s weirdness - she knows. She  _ has  _ to know.  And if she knows - and she didn’t tell Newt, about his  _ own mother _ \- then what else isn’t she telling him about the angels? 

About the messages?

About  _ Thomas _ ?

How much is there, exactly, that he’s missing here? How much is there that’s been right in front of him the entire time - not just since Thomas, but since - his entire life?

Mary puts a cold hand over his and he can almost feel his soul falling back into his body, like waking up from a falling dream. Frown lines crease deep on her forehead.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have - I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s so awful what happened to your mother - and now Thomas - you’ve been through so much. I’m so sorry.” She pulls him into a hug that he barely feels, and she tells him to go home early. 

“You only have twenty minutes left, anyway. Go home.”

And so with hands still shaking and head still reeling he goes, but he doesn’t go home. 

He made plans, after all.

 

He makes the ten minute drive from the library to Teresa’s with his head somewhere else entirely, which is why it takes him so long to notice. 

He pulls into the driveway, parks, and gets out. The garden is tended to perfection and the short, musical chime of the security camera on the porch sounds. Out of reflex he shoots it a peace sign, likely an absurd image with the absolute mess he’s sure his face is in this moment.

He knocks, the same knock he has knocked for twelve years, and waits. 

There is no answer.

He knocks again.

No answer. 

He tries the bell.

And again-

He tries his best to ignore the feeling of paranoia creeping into him - he’s gotten pretty good at it at this point, considering every awful thing that’s happened to him that he’s subsequently repressed, albeit maybe not very well - but it still swells in his chest, rising, rising, until he decides to sit down on the steps of the porch. And then the feeling climbs up and out of his chest, leaping out of his mouth to land at his feet as Newt’s jaw falls open when his eyes graze over the edge of the lot.

Because, at the end of the driveway, there is a  _ for sale  _ sign driven into the grass.


	3. pendant, ii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (i can feel you getting closer, but i don't think that means what i want it to mean. i don't know if it can mean what i want it to mean anymore.)

He is on his feet in an instant, heart starting to race already. He starts toward the grass but stops himself, turning on a heel and bounding back up the stairs, pressing his face into the window beside the front door.

He squints against the reflections in the glass, searching the front room for the normal sights he’d become accustomed to over the years - the ever-growing collection of family portraits on the right wall, or the table with the glass mosaic bowl that was too pretty to be used for anything but decoration. Or hell, even a pair of shoes abandoned by the mat at the door, owner just waiting to be chastised by Thomas and Teresa’s mom.

But there is none of that to be found, because as far as Newt can see, the place is completely cleared out. 

He instinctively goes for his phone, ignoring the single notification on his screen (facebook, informing him that it’s an almost-stranger’s birthday and that he should wish them well) and scrolling frantically through his contacts until he gets to the  _ M _ ’s.

His heart lurches at the sight of the words  _ tommy murphy _ , right underneath Teresa’s contact. His muscle memory almost betrays him and sends his thumb to Thomas’ name, just like he’s done countless times before, but at the last second his brain takes over, numbly mashing the  _ call  _ button underneath Teresa’s phone number. 

Newt brings the phone up to his ear and tries to quiet his breathing, ragged and panicked. He inhales and exhales in time with the ringing, lips twitching in anticipation. After five full rings, there’s a click followed by a familiarly enthusiastic intake of breath.

“Hi, you’ve reached Teresa Murphy. Sorry I’m not there to answer your call, but if you leave a message I’ll probably get back to you. Bye!”

He sighs and ends the call without leaving anything for her voicemail, typing out a string of text messages instead.

 

**To: reese murphy**

teresa [1:06pm]

im at your house [1:06pm]

whats goign on why is there a for sale sign in ypur yard [1:06pm]

reese whats happenign [1:06pm]

 

After they’re delivered, he runs a shaky hand over his face and slips his phone back into his pocket. This is when he really starts to feel like he might throw up, body unable to process what he’s just seen on top of the things Mary told him, all of the information just sliding through the folds of his brain without actually being absorbed. 

With inky spots of black feathering out the edges of his vision, he decides to sit on the porch once more, doubled over himself with his head between his knees. The absurd thought of  _ maybe I can just wait here until she comes home  _ runs through his head, and for one insane second he accepts it as reasonable, as if a single person in the Murphy family was planning on coming home. He knows that that’s not going to happen, but he cannot fathom the idea of Going Anywhere in his current state so he defaults to inaction, which means sitting on this porch.

This porch, where he sat and drank lemonade every single Saturday afternoon in the Summer since he was seven years old, lips sticky and heart content. This porch, where he first cried over his dad disappearing, months late, into Thomas’ arms on a chilly Tuesday night. This porch, where he sat cross-legged for three hours straight, hips completely numb while Teresa painted him and Thomas in soft, spring-coloured oils, the faintest of halos around their heads. This porch, where he slipped on a patch of ice and bruised his tailbone two Winters ago, only for Thomas’ dad to install a railing the following week.

This porch, where he realized, for the first time, that he lost Thomas.

This porch, where he almost lost Minho.

And now, this porch where he’s losing Teresa. 

The repetition of it all hits him like hypothermia - once you’ve been out in the cold for long enough, you become numb to the damage it cases. The reality of it slides off him like a sheet of ice and he chooses instead to swim down into the memories, pulling his consciousness as far away as humanly possible from the ever-widening chasm in his chest.

He dives into the Summer afternoons and the hushed midnight conversations, into _ I love you’ _ s both whispered into bedsheets and yelled from literal rooftops, into the simplest expressions of love, heart stopping for a million and one reasons. He lets himself wade into the way that Thomas’ laugh turns into a wheeze, into the way he breathed after a kiss, lips barely parted from Newt’s own - always an inhale, always a little breathless, and always with the most lovestruck of smiles, like he still couldn’t believe it after two years of getting to do it. He revels in the memories, the most random of moments leaping into the forefront of his mind, like the time in English class where he realized that he’d been Pavlov’d into happiness at the smell of a sharpie, from all those mornings Thomas spent scribbling onto sticky notes. Or, when they first climbed out his bedroom window onto the roof, 3:00am sky the most beautiful thing Newt had ever seen.

He wraps himself in the past, cold hard concrete of the porch below him melting away into nothing, reality far, far, away as time loses meaning, and then-

And then he blinks himself back into the real world, the cruel punishment tied to the occasional hiccup in what was  _ supposed  _ to be an automatic bodily function, ripping him from his reverie. He realizes that a considerable amount of time has to have passed, based on how much the shadow from the  _ for sale  _ sign has moved - oh, right.

That.

Newt’s stomach churns one last time before a violent shiver racks through his entire body, leaving him with the sudden feeling of absolute exhaustion. Still, he somehow finds the strength to stand up, leaving the sea of memories pooling on the concrete behind him, reality finally sinking deep into his bones, dry as dust. 

His phone buzzes then and he scrambles to check it, hope skyrocketing and then plummeting down when he realizes it’s just a snapchat notification from Minho and not a text from Teresa, explaining that all of this is just a bad dream or an elaborate prank or only a spur of the moment family trip. But there is no magical message claiming any of those things, and deep down Newt knows what it really is, but as he walks to his car he lies to himself and says that he will hold onto the hope that it is.

(Thomas would tell him not to worry until he knows what’s going on for sure -  _ don’t prematurely catastrophize,  _ he’d say,  _ look, Reese hasn’t even read your text yet - she’s one of those absolute maniacs that leaves their read receipts on. There’s nothing else you can do to change the situation until she tells you what’s up. _

It’s bold words coming from Thomas, who will take any small moderately bad thing and internally escalate it to a full-blown emergency, then act impulsively based on grossly inflated versions of whatever situation he finds himself in. 

But Newt supposes that’s just the kind of person Thomas  _ is _ , somehow able to give sound, rational advice and simultaneously utterly unable to follow that same advice when the tables are turned. He is also the kind of person that is completely and entirely  _ not here _ , sage words of encouragement entirely a fiction born of Newt’s own mind. 

He doesn’t take the time to worry about the ease with which he conjures Thomas up from nothing, fully accepting his presence as genuine for those few, sweet seconds.)

He is pulling out of the driveway when the sick sense of finality settles uncomfortably into his gut. The notion that this is the last time he’ll be doing this thing he’s done for the past ten years of his life is not one he has the capability to process at the moment, so it just sits shallowly on the surface of consciousness like,  _ this is fine.  _

He repeats those words to himself like a manta until he is home, and then the door clicks behind him and it is like the glass protecting his mind from reality shatters, shards of horrible truths and glass alike cutting him up inside as they sink into his consciousness, into the forefront of his being, until they are the only thing he knows.

His mom was obsessed with them, too.

Teresa and her family are gone.

The angels watch over both of them.

Thomas doesn’t think he can save her.

Teresa doesn’t think that the  _ her  _ is her-

-which can only mean one thing. 

He grabs Thomas’ book and a packet of sticky notes from the bedside table, sitting down on the floor of his room as he flips frantically through the pages. He searches for anything that could be alluding to her, anything he could have missed the first few times around - a sketch, a line in a poem, a cryptic phrase in a letter -  _ anything _ . It is midnight mania at three in the afternoon.

He finds three pieces of heart-stuttering interest:

 

\- a series of poems

\- a series of dates

\- a series of sketches

 

The poems aren’t something that initially catches his eye - it was not out of the norm for Thomas to spend the majority of his class time scribbling incoherent little poems in the margins of his notes. Combinations of whatever words had popped into his head at the time, somehow bundled together in a few lines of surprisingly eloquent verse. He’d even rip them out of his notebook sometimes, tossing balled up pieces of paper to Newt’s desk when their teacher wasn’t paying attention. Those ones were mostly short, describing the extent of Newt’s angelic presence in perhaps the most poetic arrangement of language available to the human brain. There are more than a few of those in the book, all written out in careful letters as opposed to Thomas’ usual messy scrawl. Newt recognizes a couple of them from the notes from class, cleaned up and expanded upon to flatter the curve of both his smile and ass in one fell swoop, even more passionately so than the previous drafts

But there are some he doesn’t recognize. The handwriting is decidedly more rushed, smudged from left to right as if he’d dragged his hand over the words. It takes a minute or two for him to be able to decipher what it actually says, but when he does, his blood runs cold. 

 

_ I wonder why it is me and not him that _

_ she speaks to _

_      they tell me that i am the one _

_ she tells me that they watch over her _

_ and she watches over me _

_      so i will watch over him, _

_ for her, _

_ for me, _

_      for them _

The page of dates is nestled towards the end of the book, a simple list spanning the entire page. Nothing is labelled or annotated. At first glance it looks completely random, but then Newt starts to recognize some of the individual days:

_ 18/05/13 _ \- the night they first kissed, not even a second long, the two of them both pulling back in shock that it had actually  _ happened.  _

_ 19/05/13 _ \- the morning they decided to be together, preceded by an agonizing ten hours of time between the kiss and the conversation where Thomas had bolted, convinced he’d ruined everything. 

_ 01/06/13  _ \- the day they’d finally mustered up the courage to tell Minho and Teresa they were together, only to be laughed off their bikes because, apparently,  _ everyone in town knows that, guys. _

_ 12/07/13  _ \- this one takes Newt a second to recall the importance of, but once he does, it’s obvious: a late Summer night, stargazing in the field behind Thomas’ house. Newt had looked over at him and said the words for the first time, simple and true:  _ I love you.  _

There are a couple more he knows the significance of, (first time they fucked, when they became Facebook Official - a year late - and that one really good day they spent entirely together) and a couple he thinks he has good guesses at, (the first time Thomas showed him the statue, that time they got detention for being late to class because they were too busy making out behind a tree at lunch) but there are several he has not even the slightest idea for; no matter how hard he tries to recall the day he remembers nothing significant happening.

And then there’s one date at the very top of the page, numbers slightly scrunched as if he’d added them above everything else at a later time. It is incomplete, the first two numbers there but the last one - the spot for the year- is missing. 

Newt can instantly think of three separate dates that mean something to him.

_ 03/08/15  _ \- today’s date.

_ 03/08/14  _ \- the day Thomas went missing.

_ 03/08/03  _ \- the day his mom died.

The sketches are scattered throughout the book, all different scenes and subjects. There are a fair amount featuring the two of them and their friends - which Newt dwells on, maybe cries on, and lets momentarily heal his still frantic heart - but the ones of interest are a small grouping of angels: not statues but humanlike figures, all the same woman smiling slightly crooked, softly, like she has never known anything but peace. 

She looks familiar in a way that Newt cannot put his finger on, almost like Sonya but not quite. But then he notices the freckle underneath her right eye, the same one that he has. And then he turns the page to find a full-page piece of the same woman, looking over her shoulder with tired eyes and an elegant halo framing the crown of her head. The drawing feels like its pulled out of Newt’s memory, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind that he currently cannot access. It leaves him unsettled, lump sitting thickly at the base of his throat. 

(It will stay there, beneath his vocal tract like a tumor, until many months later, when he digs out the box full of ornate frames in the back of his dad’s closet.)

And then, finally, his eyes fall on the title of that particular sketch, a single name encased in quotation marks - the most damning of them all. 

_ “Beth.” _

The culmination of it all is seconds away from hitting him when Sonya appears in the hallway, backpack sliding off her shoulder and falling to the ground. 

“Newt?” she asks, concern urgent in her voice as she comes into the room, crouching down beside him. With that he realizes that he probably looks about as awful as he feels, pale and shaking like a leaf in the wind. 

“Hi,” he says, waving weakly, which is about the maximum of what he can muster right now. He doesn’t know how he never noticed it before, but Sonya really does look so much like their mom. He tries not to choke. 

She smiles tightly, skeptical. “Hi, what’s wrong?” 

“I-” he starts but stops, exhaling an empty breath. Sonya doesn’t know anything about their mom, and she certainly doesn’t know anything about Thomas knowing about her, and in what capacity. According to her, she barely even remembers her from when she was alive. Newt slowly closes the book and clutches it to his chest. He knows he’s going to have to tell her eventually. He knows that. But right now it still feels too unreal, too unimaginable. He doesn’t want her to have to hurt like that, not now or not ever. 

But she is waiting for him to tell her something, so-

“I think Teresa and her parents are gone.”

Her eyelids immediately start fluttering, expression of tense nervousness melting into quivering blotches of red. “What?” She blinks and a tear falls from her eyelash onto the carpet as she stands. “What - what do you mean?”

“Sorry, sorry,” he backtracks, internally cursing his ambiguous choice of words, “I mean, not  _ gone _ , gone. I think - I think they left.”

“ _ Left? _ ”

“I went by their house earlier and - and it was just. It was cleared out, Son.” The words are the trigger that finally open the floodgates he’s been wrenching closed the entire day, hot tears pouring onto his face as his voice falters. “There was nobody - there was-” his throat cracks with a sob and Sonya sits back down, grabbing Newt’s hand as she sniffles wetly. “There was a  _ for sale  _ sign at the end of the driveway.”

“I saw her  _ yesterday _ . She didn’t - they didn’t. They didn’t say anything.” Her voice falls off at the end, curling in on itself just like her shoulders do, slumping in defeat. “They didn’t even say anything,” she repeats, almost a whisper, and it breaks Newt’s heart. He searches in vain for something to say in response and comes up short, halfway through the inhale of something sure to be mediocre when his phone buzzes loudly from his desk, stopping them both short.

A second later, Sonya’s phone goes off too, and they look at each other for one confused second before reaching for their respective devices. 

It’s a message from Teresa, addressed to him, Sonya, and Minho.

 

**From: reese murphy**

hey guys so

there’s no really beating around the bush on this one

my mom got a job at a hospital in seattle and she 

decided to take it. so we’re moving. i wanted to tell

you guys sooner but it was all so so sudden and

i’m really really sorry and i want to be able to explain

it to you guys more like if maybe we could skype

all together tomorrow because i don’t know how to

explain it here i’m just so sorry i love you guys so

much but i just can’t be here anymore i can’t be here 

when he’s not [4:04pm]

i’m sorry [4:04pm]

 

And then Newt’s screen starts to go screwy, because of course it does.

The look on Sonya’s face as her head whips up tells him that hers is too - a mixture of fear, confusion, and the tiniest undertone of excitement in the glint of her eyes, wide and waiting for whatever comes next. 

What comes next is that the lights start flickering, pulsing from brightness to nothing, loud and angry. He almost expects for the room to start spinning as well, wind gushing through the halls from some invisible window by the force of god or Thomas or the angels or whoever the fuck was actually responsible for all of this.

(Newt is not sure if there is a difference between the three, anyway.)

The screens of their phones go dark and the lights equilibrate, and for three entire seconds the room is calm, and Newt thinks that maybe that’s it.

He thinks that maybe, it was just a small one. Maybe Thomas is having a harder time getting through to them without Teresa here, like she’s a tether or something. Maybe it was just an actual power surge and had nothing to do with anything he’s been obsessing over for the past year.

“Is that it?” Sonya asks. She carefully presses a finger to the home button of her phone, which does not turn on. 

Newt holds his breath, and starts on a whisper of a guess. “I’m not-”

He does not get to finish because then the room pulses with a flash of pure white, the image of Sonya’s scared eyes burned into his retinas as the world around him gets impossibly brighter, so bright it feels like his skin is on fire. He reaches for her in the white just as the bulb overhead explodes, sound of shattering glass mirrored by Sonya’s shriek. 

The light filtering in from behind the curtains does nothing to help Newt’s sight, inky black filled with tiny white dots like static, pulsating rapidly with each beat of his heart. He thinks he hears something like Sonya asking if he’s okay while he brushes the shards of glass out of his hair, but he can’t really hear it; he can just feel the vice grip of her hands on his arms, unknowingly pressing the sharp edges of the broken bulb into his flesh. Even then, the sensation is barely there. 

And then, loud and clear, the radio on Newt’s bedside table starts to beep. It starts slow, simple, as if he was setting the time. He cranes his head backwards - like a ball of lead on a slinky, it feels - and squints to find that that is what’s actually happening, the numbers steadily declining, pace increasing with each minute lost. After a second or two the numbers flip so fast that their individual  _ beeps  _ meld together into one high pitched screech, reaching a deafening maximum as the numbers suddenly freeze, stuck in a trio of threes at  _ 3:33.  _ He doesn’t have time to ponder the significance of that particular combination of numbers before there is a loud  _ popping  _ noise, cutting off the screech but leaving behind a thin metallic ringing in Newt’s ears, sending him doubling over in pain. 

For a short moment the room is silent, and then they hear the breathing. 

It is heavy and laboured, and it is without a single doubt, Thomas. 

It doesn’t come from the radio, like last time, but from all around them, emanating from every corner of the room. Sonya grabs him impossibly tighter, tears falling from her eyes as she looks at him in open-mouthed shock, like,  _ holy shit, it’s him.  _ Newt nods like,  _ I know _ , not even trying to speak. 

Their brief moment of minute shared happiness comes to a sobering halt as the breathing grows more pained, exhales dragging on the beginning of a sob and inhales teasing loose the smallest of whines, thin and panicked. They get louder with the ringing in tandem, both sounds rising until they feel like they’re coming from inside of Newt’s brain, expanding the walls of his skull. It’s at this point that the rest of his body starts to ache, arms and calves burning, fresh and raw like the tingling he’s noticed in the back of his mind but so, so much worse. It feels like the skin is peeling off of his body, curling into neat little coils of flesh as they rebound from touching the hot element that is underneath his skin, pulsing out from within him, until there is no room, no Sonya, and no sound - just burning, burning, burning. He thinks he might pass out, consciousness fringing in and out of this dimension as his muscles begin to seize, body flayed open to the very core of his being and-

And then it stops as immediately as it started, like the world’s stopped spinning on its axis and flung him into the wall and one thousand miles per hour, no mercy and no remorse.

It feels like one hundred years later when he lands back in his room, skin still hot and raw as the sound of Sonya screaming his name over and over again reaches the part of his brain that processes sound. He opens his eyes and sucks in a massive breath, realizing that he has not breathed in what is probably a very long time. A couple blinks later and he finds Sonya sitting in front of him. She is crying. He is also probably crying when she throws her arms around him, shaking hands woven full of bright red scratches, razor thin, matching his almost exactly. A piece of glass stuck in the folds of her braid catches on his cheekbone when she pulls him in close, but he barely feels it. 

“Is it always like this?” she asks after they’ve separated, voice somewhere between horrified and incredulous. 

Newt takes a breath.  _ I mean, kind of,  _ he almost says, but he catches the sight of her quivering lip and at the last second changes his words. “No,” he answers, and it’s not technically a lie. “Not - not that much. Never that much.”

She nods and lets out a shaky breath, wiping the tears off her face once and for all - and in the process getting a swipe of blood under her left eye. But a new resolve comes over her all the same, eyes hardening in tired determination.

He knows that she wants to ask him more, to pick his brain know everything he’s been holding back from her, inside and out. She wants to help. She wants to be included, even if it means going through  _ this.  _ She wants to clean the blood from his skin, the patchwork of shallow scrapes a jarring difference from the normal order or his arms, usually covered or faded or explained away, not even close to convincing. She wants to ask - she always wants to ask - but she won’t, because she can’t, because  _ he  _ can’t. She wants and wants and wants, all of this and more, but there is only one word that falls out of her mouth, quiet and final, its definitive nature something for which Newt is utterly grateful:

“Okay.”

He sighs, manages a weak smile, and ignores the pounding in his head. “Okay.”

 

Later, when he is curled up on the couch with a mug of tea, Sonya comes into the living room with freshly washed hair and swollen eyes. 

“Minho’s coming over tomorrow at eleven, and we’re all skyping with Teresa at one.”

He nods blankly, then frowns. 

“I plugged your phone in, they’re both fine,” she explains, anticipating his confusion. “It’s in your room. Check the group chat.”

He nods again, not trusting his voice. Sonya turns to leave, but then stops. 

“She feels really bad about it, Newt. I think - you should say something, tonight. Doesn’t have to be a novel, just. Something.” She looks like she has something else to say but bites her tongue, heading back down the hall. But then, she stops in the doorway to her room and looks back, next words almost inaudible. Newt’s not sure if they’re for him or not.

“She’s not the bad guy, here. No one is.”

 

That night, he dreams.

He is running through the forest, eyes watching through every break in the branches. There is no mistaking where he is running to, scenery flying by him as familiar as the freckles mapped out on Thomas’ face.

Their clearing is empty. A moderate layer of snow hugs the ground like a blanket, sloping gently over the familiar shape of the logs that lay there. The eyes glint and gleam like diamonds in the the slowly falling sun, making it seem as if Newt is surrounded by walls of sparkling snow, stretching up from the sides of the clearing.

It all seems perfectly normal. 

Though he knows, somehow, that they are not his friends.

He is momentarily distracted by the howling of the wind and turns his head back over his shoulder. When his gaze returns to the clearing, he finds that it is no longer empty.

There is Thomas, standing in the centre of an all-too-familiar pedestal, paled moss frozen down to its roots and clinging tightly to the stone. He sways slightly in place, as if he is too weak to anchor himself against the wind, teetering, and nearly as pale as the snow all around him. Even his hair looks like it has a layer of dust embedded in the roots. Newt might have thought he was made of stone if not for the gaping wound in his neck, pulsating thickly with an overspilling of deep red liquid each time his shoulders lurch forwards. 

Time stretches to an eternity as Newt stands with feet planted in the snow, heart there on the ground in front of him. The blood begins to run down Thomas’ arms and off the ends of his fingertips, pooling at the base of where he stands in two perfect, symmetrical circles. His mouth moves, the twitch of his lips so minute Newt can barely see it. It is clear that he is trying to speak, but there is only blood, coating his teeth and pouring from his lips in lieu of sound.

The eyes shift and shimmer, leaning in closer to get a good look at the spectacle playing out in front of them. But they are not merely an audience - standing idly by, waiting for the next moments to unfold - but active players in the scene, suffocating the words out of Thomas with every empty breath. 

He reaches out to Newt, arms lifting with great difficulty as the blood not already dried onto the skin follows gravity down to gather in the crook of his elbow. There is nothing that Newt wants more than to take his hand as he’s done so many times before, the feeling he could never forget flashing through his mind as easy as breathing. 

But he can’t move and he can’t breathe, arms frozen in place at his sides by the unseen force of the onlookers in the trees. Thomas’ arms begin to shake as his lip quivers, face contorting in pain as the blood begins to rush out of him once more, marring the perfect white of the snow beneath. His eyes roll loosely into the back of his head, scleras more red than white with scattered veins running thickly. 

In the sickening desperation of it all Newt feels his limbs loosen, divine hold on them released. He sets off immediately, feet nearly slipping out behind him in the slickness of the fresh snow as he bounds forward, arms outstretched. Their fingers are a breath away from meeting when the world suddenly extends before Newt, Thomas impossibly further in an instant. Newt keeps running but he keeps on getting farther, being held back, back, and back until Thomas is a red speck on the white horizon. 

And then his vision floods with crimson and he is drowning, drowning, drowning, until-

 

He wakes up much too early, thrust back into consciousness before the sun has even crept over the horizon. After a second of panicked blinking he recognizes the walls around him, not white or red but pale green, barely showing through the mass of sticky notes on one wall and hurricane of newspaper articles, internet findings, and red string on the other. 

Once he gets his bearings and his breath has slowed from hyperventilation to just-climbed-up-a-flight-of-stairs, Newt realizes that his skin is cold and damp. For one awful second he considers the very real possibility that maybe he pissed himself - and then he tells himself that that is stupid, and that he’s just unbelievably sweaty. Without thinking, he rips off the covers like a warm, moist bandaid and stumbles out into the washroom, turning on the shower before he can convince himself to sleep for another couple hours. 

Because if he goes back to sleep, he’s not sure what will be waiting for him there.

The water is nearly scalding but he makes no move to change the temperature, letting it wash over his skin as he leans his head against the shower wall, his brain catching up with the last twenty four hours of his life.

Mary and Newt’s mom - and everything that meant for, well,  _ everything.  _ Teresa and her parents. Sonya and the lights. And now, the image of Thomas in the clearing, in  _ its  _ spot, blood pouring out of him. This is the one he lingers on, frozen still in Newt’s mind. No matter how much he tries to concentrate on the rest of it - what his mom knew about the angels and what Thomas knew about his mom, how long Teresa had been planning on leaving them, if Teresa was  _ okay _ , what the power surge in his room, sans any discernible message other than that awful breathing, had meant - Newt finds himself unable to see anything other than deep red circling the drain at his feet.

He blinks and finds himself back in the forest, feet planted firmly in the reddened snow. Thomas is standing on his pedestal now but a foot away, this time unmoving as if turned to stone. There is no sign of life save for the steady stream of blood oozing from the opening at the base of his throat, dripping off the sharp edges of his collarbone onto Newt’s feet. 

He reaches a shivering hand out to stroke Thomas’ pale, unliving cheek but something stops him like a wall. It is then that he notices the purple colour spreading across the back of his own hand, darkening over the thin slope of his tendons. The two of them look like a bruise against the stark white of the world around them, deep crimson and muted purple melding together on the most unforgiving canvas that god or any angel could have managed. 

Then he realizes that he is shaking violently, and he is back in the shower, one hand pressed against the tile as the freezing water streams over his body.

He scrambles to turn off the water and grabs a towel, wrapping it tightly around himself.  Tremors still rack through his body even after he has gotten dressed, after he has found himself hunched over his second cup of tea, steam rising into his chattering teeth and somehow tasting of cool Winter air. 

He sits for a long time, until the sun has made its way through the living room and into the kitchen, and wonders if maybe - just maybe - they’re finally getting to him, too. 

 

A couple hours later, after sufficient thawing, Newt has been assigned to fruit slicing duty while Sonya fixes up a bowl of dubiously thick looking pancake mix. He is no longer  _ completely  _ catatonic, but he is still out of it enough that he doesn’t notice her using milk instead of water until it’s too late, as she’s putting the carton back in the fridge.

There is the abrupt sound of knuckles rapping on glass, and Minho appears at the back doors. Newt nearly slices his finger off but instead waves him in, letting out a small sigh for the memory of three seconds ago when he didn’t have to act like an actual human person. 

“Hey,” Newt says, putting the knife down so he can focus on Minho’s face as he walks in, Sonya’s voice ringing in his head:  _ I don’t think she’s been doing that great, maybe you should go check on her.  _ If he’s going to stop being a shitty friend, he’s actually going to have to make an effort to be a good one. “How’s it going?”

The scars curling up Minho’s neck and cheek are considerably lighter than the last time Newt saw him, but the pale branch-like figures are still shocking against his dark skin. He slings his bag onto the couch and whips his head dramatically to the right, pointing at his ear.

“Hearing aid finally came in, so if you’re talking shit, I’ll hear you.” He flashes a shit-eating grin that doesn’t quite reach his eyes and pulls out a chair from the table, straddling it backwards.

It’s like a punch to his already hollow chest, and Newt can’t find the air in his lungs to continue the banter. There’s an undeniably awkward beat where the sadness underlying Minho’s statement hangs heavily in the air, but then Sonya picks it up.

“Oh, good - I was getting kinda tired of constantly having to yell about how much of a dumbass you are. Got a bit of a sore throat.”

And just like that, they’re back.

The back and forth keeps up through the cooking of the pancakes and then dies off when they sit down to eat, slow chewing taking up the airspace. Newt starts to feel sick three quarters of the way through his first pancake, and he queasily eyes the second one sitting beside the single strip of bacon as he lets out a sigh that is a tad too loud, drawing both Sonya and Minho’s eyes toward him. 

Sonya’s neutral expression falls immediately and she blinks, giving Newt a subtle but pointed look. Minho pretends not to notice and Newt shoves another bite of pancake into his mouth to avoid sighing again. It goes down his throat like cement.

It takes everything he has in him not to gag. 

He knows he’s not going to be finishing his plate - hell, he’s not even going to finish the first pancake. And no one’s going to force it down his throat, sure, but both Sonya and Minho are going to sit there, staring at their own empty plates wondering if it’s their place to finally say something (it’s not - if it was anyone’s it’d be Sonya’s, but Minho’s here so she definitely won’t) while Newt continues to become more and more aware of the weight sitting in his stomach, wishing he was alone so that he could remove it, or that he never had to put it there in the first place. And then once he gets past the guilt of  _ that _ , he’ll get into the guilt of feeling guilty in the first place, the guilt of not being able to function like a normal human person, and how much of a stressor that puts on his baby sister, and then-

“Newt, did you hear me?”

He blinks to see the two of them looking at him expectantly.

Minho cracks the tiniest of smiles. “Gee, and to think  _ I’m  _ the deaf one.”

And no matter how far away Newt had been, he and Sonya were still somehow exactly on beat:

“ _ Min _ ,” they whine, rolling their eyes in tandem. He grins even wider, chuckling to himself while Newt and Sonya share a brief, secret look, something uncomfortable like  _ I’m not sure if I’m ready to be in the  _ joking about that  _ stage of this thing.  _

The moment passes and Newt clears his throat. “Uhm, sorry, yeah, I missed what you said earlier.”

“It’s okay. I just said that we should set up skype now, make sure the connection’s good and all that.”

_ Right. That.  _ In his spiral of food-related thoughts, Newt had almost forgotten the entire reason why they were all there together that morning.  _ Selfish again,  _ he thinks almost automatically,  _ making it all about you when we’re here for Teresa.  _ He knows, somewhere in that brain of his, that that’s not true. 

(But he believes it all the same.)

A couple of minutes later, they’re all clumped together on one side of the table, Minho’s laptop sitting across from them. The three of them are squished comfortably together in the frame, almost like a family portrait. Even though they fill the entire width of the screen, Newt can’t help but feel there is something missing.

(He is tired, of feeling like there is something missing.)

At 12:45pm on the dot, all three of their phones buzz in unison. Minho reaches over to open the message on his laptop, squinting across the table as their group chat opens.

 

**From: trees suck**

hey, you guys good to go on skype soon? [12:45pm]

 

Newt smiles first at Minho’s contact name for her, something he’d almost forgotten his friend had done. A quick glance up the chat reminds him that his and Sonya’s own are  _ lizard 1  _ and  _ lizard 2,  _ respectively, which is just as hilarious as it is infuriating. He then feels his heart warm at Teresa’s penchant for punctuality - it’s small, but it’s so on brand for her that it makes Newt ache at how much he misses her already. The thought flashes into his mind that he will likely never experience that compulsive need to be early again - no frantic texts asking where everyone is half an hour before they’re supposed to meet, no knocks on the back door before he’s even changed out of his pajamas, and no shitty cafeteria coffee waiting for him at his locker in the mornings, accompanied by an  _ I’ve-been-awake-for-three-hours-already  _ smile. 

It is not a thought he enjoys, pushing it away before he can fully think it. 

Minho moves to type something but Sonya’s reply pops up on the screen before he can get a sentence down.

 

**From: lizard 2**

yeah we are all ready!!! we’ll call in a sec [12:45pm]

 

Minho shoots a look of mock rage over his shoulder and dramatically clicks out of iMessage, skype filling the screen once more. A few flicks of the wrist later and the calling animation starts up, obnoxious jingle playing on max volume. Both Newt and Sonya cringe back a bit, but Minho remains notably unbothered.

The app goes quiet and stalls for a second, and then the image of Teresa is stretched across the screen.

She stares intently at the camera, chewing on her bottom lip. The picture freezes for a moment and then she’s breaking out into this big smile, one that dampens almost immediately, morphing into something more reserved, hesitant. 

“Hey, guys,” she says. Her voice matches the uncertainty on her face, almost breathless and wavering slightly.

For a second Newt thinks she might start to cry, but then Sonya gives a drawn out, excited, “ _ Hiiiiii, _ ” and the boys follow suit. 

“Hey, Teresa!”

“Hi Reese.”

A significant amount of the anxiety drains visibly from her face, head bobbing just a bit. She sniffles, smiling in that happy-sad way that comes with seeing the people you love on a screen instead of face-to-face. “Hey guys,” she repeats, quieter.

Nobody knows quite where to go from there -  _ how are you doing  _ doesn’t feel appropriate given the fact that they all know that none of them are doing great, or good, or anywhere close to that.  _ What’s up  _ isn’t really it either, because although the answer is what they want -  _ need _ \- to hear, the phrasing of the question itself implies a certain degree of casualness, and their situation is nowhere near casual.  _ Hey, why did you and your family suddenly skip town out of nowhere,  _ might be more like it. 

Teresa clearly senses the shift in atmosphere because she lets out a long, shaky sigh, eyes closed in anticipation. “So I know you guys probably have a lot of questions.”

_ Yeah, no shit _ . Before breakfast, the three of them had talked about what they were going to say, ‘just so they could be all on the same page’, which was really code for so that no one snaps and turns it into a webcam-powered shitshow. They’d agreed not to be accusatory or angry - no one wanted to make Teresa more upset than she already was, and they certainly didn’t want her to get the idea that any of this was her fault, because it wasn’t.

(It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her fault.)

None of them want to be the one to ask first. Minho looks down and Newt lets his gaze wander over to the kitchen, his unfinished plate still sitting on the counter. He wishes he’d binned it earlier, when Sonya was busy with the pans, but they really couldn’t afford to be wasteful, not even one plate.

He zones back into the present when Sonya, youngest in the room but ever the adult, clears her throat and speaks softly. 

“How are you guys settling in?”

Teresa exhales, a sweatered hand coming up to rub the back of her neck. Newt notices then, for the first time, the only partly furnished room behind her. It’s unfamiliar, like she’d set up shop in someone else’s bedroom and called them up.

Except now, it’s her bedroom. 

“Oh, yeah, that’s going okay. It’s - it’s really busy and we’re still waiting on most of the big furniture to get here so it’s a little, like, bare,” she says, tilting her laptop to the side and gesturing with an arm to show off her barren surroundings, “but, uhm. It’s really nice here.”

“In - Seattle, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Seattle children’s hospital.” She says it in a skater-esque voice, throwing up a peace sign on what appears to be instinct. 

Newt almost smiles. “That’s where your mom got the job?”

She nods. “Yeah, they’d been trying to poach her for a while, actually. They were, uh, pretty happy when she called them.”

It’s painfully careful, the way the four of them dance around the conversation, just waiting for one of them to leap onto a landmine. The threat of it flirts with the beginning and end of every word, an inevitability. 

After another beat, she takes a breath. “So,” she starts, voice already breaking as her features contort together, mangling the next set of words as they come out. “I’m really sorry, guys.”

The kitchen table erupts into a collection of half hearted  _ no _ ’s and  _ Teresa _ ’s and  _ don’t be sorry _ ’s but she ignores them all, waving her friends into silence once more as she finally attempts to explain herself through gasping breaths. “I just - I just couldn’t take it anymore. There’s too much of him here. He’s  _ everywhere,  _ and it just hurts, it hurts so much. I’m  _ sorry. _ ” She stops, cutting herself off with a choked sob as her breathing, her shaking, her  _ sorry _ ’s - her everything - escalates, with absolutely nothing any of Newt, Sonya, or Minho can do about it but watch. “Fuck,” she finally says, between breaths, “I’m sorry, I’m - just give me a second.” And then she disappears from the frame, peeling off her bed with the sound of a door opening and closing not long after.

The three of them share an awful, helpless look, all completely speechless. Sonya has tears in her eyes and Minho buries his face in his hands. Newt wants to walk into the woods and never stop walking. An odd thought pops into his head then:  _ I hope she remembered to bring her inhaler.  _ She and Thomas both had asthma when they were young, but she grew out of hers while he continued to be consciously bad at one of the easiest unconscious bodily functions. He doesn’t know why he remembers that she sometimes got flare ups if she was really worked up about something, and his leg twitches to go down the hall to his room and grab the extra inhaler he kept for Thomas in his bedside table. 

But that wouldn’t help because he is here and she is there, which is just another thing on the list of things he has no control over. So he continues to sit there, helpless and horrified, until she returns a minute later, breathing normal and eyes dried but red and swollen all the same. 

“Sorry,” she says, sniffling forcefully, “I’m sorry I haven’t been myself lately. I’m sure you guys have noticed. I just - I miss him. I miss him  _ so much _ , and everything there reminds me of him. It’s been - school was kind of a distraction, but once we got out, I just. I haven’t been doing too well, guys.” For a second it looks like she might break down again, but she continues on, only a single tear running down her cheek. “And my parents, too, they’ve barely been holding it together this past year. I think we all just needed something… Something.”

Sonya nods empathetically, actually reaching her hand out to the edge of Minho’s laptop as if it were Teresa’s own. “We don’t blame you, T. Any of us would’ve done the same.” 

_ If we had the parents, or the money to do it.  _ He doesn’t dare say it, but Newt knows that they are all thinking it in the pause hanging after her words. 

“Yeah,” Minho chimes softly.

Teresa nods, closing her eyes. “And we’re - this isn’t me giving up on him,” she says, guilt coming through in the desperation of her voice. She looks pointedly at the camera and somehow Newt knows it was meant for him. “I’m not. That’s not what this is. I just-” she sighs deeply, lip quivering once again. She takes a moment to regain the relative calm, and then looks up again, eyes piercing.

“I just don’t trust myself there.”

After that, she tells them that she is going to miss them so much, and that they will all keep in touch. Newt doesn’t know if she really has it in her to follow through on that promise, but he knows that when he tells her that he loves her and that he will be thinking of her all the time, he truly means it. They make a date to have another skype session in a few weeks, once she and her family are settled into their new house, and then just like that the call is over.

Then, at the exact same time, Newt, Sonya, and Minho all burst into tears. 

There is a surge of laughter at the start over the novelty of them all crying at once, but it wears off shortly after and the tears continue. Newt doesn’t even know what he is crying over as there is so much his heart has to weep for. He doesn’t know what is happening as a profound sense of loss takes over his body, racking him through and through with some of the most acute pain he’s allowed himself to feel in a long, long time. It lasts a couple of minutes or so and then Sonya is off to change into something that sounds a lot like a garbled version of  _ pajamas.  _

Newt and Minho look at each other for a moment, hiccupping almost smiles at the sorry sight of their collective selves before going in for a hug. It lasts several minutes, neither of them wanting to let go of the remainder of their friend group, dwindling and broken. 

Thomas and Teresa had always been the anchors of their group, tying them to the ground of their tiny town. They were there when Newt moved from England, back in kindergarten, and they were there when Minho and his mom moved out from the city, two years before that. Their parents were well known and well respected, random adults always stopping the four of them when they used to go out biking just so they could ask the famed twins how their parents were doing. When Newt’s dad had disappeared, leaving him and Sonya stranded on their own, the Murphy’s had done everything short of legally adopting them to ensure they kept their heads above water.

They were anchored deep in the veins of that town, and within a single day they had been uprooted, twelve years of sturdy foundation turned to nothing but loose dirt and air pockets, new and unsteady under Newt’s feet.

 

He stands there, best friend wrapped tight in his arms, wondering how many more more losses he can take before the ground crumbles beneath him.

  
  


As Summer comes to a close, Newt decides to try the whole waking up early thing for a while.

He walks down the residential streets in the pre-dawn calm, taking random turns and watching the glow of orange pour slowly over rooftops he doesn’t know. The sky is painted in watercolours, a pale purple toned blue fading steadily into a soft peach - the colour like the last dregs of summer skirting the treetops like a halo, not quite ready to submit to the nearing beckon of fall. 

The cool morning air feels almost foreign to him, and he thinks that he probably looks like a zombie waking up for the first time as he walks lethargically around the town. He mostly keeps to the farther reaches of the residential area, staying clear of the schools and shops toward the centre of it all. 

He imagines a world where he’d said yes when Thomas asked him to join the track team with him and Minho almost two years prior. He probably would have started dragging himself out of bed at an ungodly hour much like this one, meeting up with Thomas to run his morning route, winding through the curves of their town while its residents were still being lulled out of sleep by the rising sun. 

It occurs to him that he never asked Thomas where he ran in the mornings. 

And now, he probably won’t ever know. 

Newt doesn’t run. He thinks about it, but something about it just feels like it would be wrong to do it, alone and of his own volition after weeks of Thomas’ unsuccessful nagging. 

But he likes to imagine, in that other world, that they might have run together in the forest, so that’s where he goes.

He gets into the habit of popping into the greenhouse on his way out, a small cutting of flowers in his hand to accompany him on his journey into the woods. He does make an earnest effort to explore the paths he doesn’t know by heart already, but something always brings him back to the clearing, like a paperclip to a magnet: immediate, inevitable. 

(It takes almost the full month for him to stop blinking the Thomas of his dreams into the statue’s place, bloody and petrified.)

He leaves the flowers on the scales, somewhere between a grievance, an offering, and an apology. They never change the balance, and they are never there the next morning. He doesn’t think about it. He closes his eyes and tries to feel the ground under his feet, the breeze on his skin. Sometimes, if he gets it just right, he can pretend that Thomas is there with him, the sound of graphite scratching quietly on paper supplied so generously by his brain. 

But it never lasts, and he always leaves shortly after. 

 

He rises, somehow, even earlier on the last Sunday of the month so that he can take Sonya to the city for a whirlwind of a morning: her monthly spot selling at the farmer’s market, and then a break to go do her driver’s test, and then back to the market. They load two crates filled to the brim with vegetables and then another with flowers into the trunk of the station wagon, and then another bag full of seed starter packs and other assorted plant paraphernalia on the floor of the back seat beside the cashbox. 

They pick up Harriet on the way, who Sonya’s entrusted to run the booth while she and Newt run over to the other side of the city for her test. Newt barely has half an innocently masked comment out of his mouth before she turns red and cuts him off:

“She’s my best friend, of course I trust - you know what, actually, could you just shut up for a while? You’re making me nervous for my test.”

And of course, she passes without losing a single point. 

 

Summer slowly fades into Fall, no memorable boundary between the two other than the start of school. Even that isn’t really an event in Newt’s mind, a non-thing which he can probably attribute to the fact that most of the time, he doesn’t go. 

It turns into a problem during the third week of school. 

He’s noticed Minho has been more on edge for some time, since around when Teresa and her family left. Newt has known Minho for a long time, and he knows that when he’s on edge, there are usually two ways it can go: he can either overcompensate and amp up the sarcasm, cracking jokes left and right until whatever’s bothering him gets resolved or goes away, or he can shut down and shut everyone out, sarcasm turning more bitter and more mean until he finally snaps. 

Newt can’t remember the last time he heard Minho make a joke. 

(He vastly prefers the joking variety of emotionally stunted Minho; his friend tends to just be one of those people that can keep an entire room calm in a disaster, so as soon as  _ he _ shows signs of stress, that’s when they all know they should really be worrying.)

 

It happens on a Tuesday morning.

 

He’s driving down one of the bigger roads between towns, surrounded by nothing but fields of wheat. There is no one else on the road when his phone starts to ring. For just one second he allows himself to think that maybe, just maybe, it will be Thomas.

He is not so lucky.

“Hey, where are you?” Minho’s voice is not a surprise. It’s short, his words clipped and bordering on accusatory. 

He holds back a sigh. “Driving.”

“Newt, you have to go to school.”

He’s not sure what it is - something in Minho’s tone, maybe, or the way he seemed ready to say it without even listening for Newt’s answer - but something in him snaps.

“What are they gonna do, call my parents? Oh, wait, I don’t have any of those. S’pose they could call my boyfriend - shit, I don’t have one of those anymore, either. I guess I can do whatever I bloody well please, then.”

“Newt-”

“Fuck off, Minho.”

He mashes the  _ end call  _ button and throws his phone into the passenger seat, breathing louder than normal as the sharpness of his anger softens, draining out of him as suddenly as it had come on. He doesn’t know where it came from, or if it’ll come again, burrowing a home beside the sadness in his heart.

He wonders if he just beat Minho to it this time, or if it was him that’s been waiting to snap all along.

(What he doesn’t know, is that it isn’t over.)

 

He usually ignores the _ new age  _ section of the library when he’s doing his reshelving rounds - he doesn’t particularly care about yoga or healing crystals, and there hasn’t been anything in any of Thomas’ messages, computer files, or notes that would lead him to believe astrology had anything to do with any of it. But, as fate would have it, there’s a particular title wedged between two books about channelling your inner spirit or some bullshit like that that catches Newt’s eye.

Mary leans back on the desk once the patron she’d been helping - a girl around Sonya’s age, dark hair hanging long in front of her face not unlike Teresa’s, a regular at their branch - floats over in the direction of the fantasy section. “What have you got this time?” she asks, tilting her head toward the book in his hands.

“ _ Angelspeake: How to Talk with Your Angels _ ,” he narrates, holding it up from the desk so that she can see the cheesy illustration on the front. “Not sold on it yet.”

She just lifts her head up in an  _ ahhh _ sort of gesture, lips pressed tight together. Since she’d oh-so-casually dropped the fact that his mom had been into angels, causing him to promptly flip the metaphorical shit, they hadn’t discussed any of it any further. 

He can tell that she’s been tiptoeing. 

“Well, let me know if it ends up being anything worth taking a look at.”

He hates it, but he won’t tell her that. 

“Will do.”

He ends up checking it out and taking it home with him that afternoon. It’s far from anything Newt’s come to know about the angels, chock-full of inspirational quotes and affirmations that he can’t help but roll his eyes at. 

He feels stupid, like some new age yuppie with too much time on their hands, but that doesn’t stop him from sitting at his desk and opening the book once more, later in the evening. According to the authors, this is how you’re supposed to speak to them:

You have to ask the angels to be with you, and then believe and trust that they will be there. Then, you pick up a pen and start writing. 

He doubts that it’ll be that easy - nothing ever is.

But he does it anyway, doubts to the wind. With eyes closed, he whispers the words to himself.

“Be here. Please.”

He repeats it once, then twice, and takes a breath. He doesn’t feel any sort of presence, not like he has before, but he has to  _ trust.  _ The pen is heavy in his hand, no divinity flowing up and out through him to the page. It’s stupid, and he feels stupid, sitting there in his room in the dark with his eyes closed trying to follow stupid instructions from a stupid book that won’t do anything but make him feel even more stupid and-

And then he feels an inkling of something, like a lightness, almost like a presence, as if someone is sitting in the corner of the room - watching, waiting, and then-

And then it’s gone, draining out of him in an instant, leaving behind nothing but a searing pain spreading through his limbs coming to a focus in his calves and forearms, muscles tensing and relaxing with each wave of burning that passes through him. 

And then that stops, too, pain gone as fast as it had appeared, leaving him empty. Before he even looks over his shoulder he knows that there is no one there, but he looks anyway. He shakes his head and closes the book with more force than is probably necessary. He shouldn’t be this upset.  _ You knew it wasn’t going to work, anyway,  _ he tells himself. Apparently, there is still a part of him that knows what hope is. 

Defeated, he sighs his way into the kitchen to make some cereal, because that is the extent of the effort he is able to expend at the moment. He sits at the kitchen table, one leg pulled up to his chest, chin resting on his knee. He’s halfway through the bowl of froot loops when the milk starts to taste too sweet and he gives up, letting the spoon sink into the bowl and pulling out his phone instead. 

He replies to a text from Sonya - a meme that she’d sent him that morning, the one he’d laughed at and then forgotten to respond to. And then, in a moment of complete mental blankness, muscle memory takes over and he scrolls down his messages until he finds his conversation with  _ tommy murphy.  _ He gets halfway through typing out a message,  _ hey do you want to-  _ abandoned as he drops his phone onto the table just as he doubles over, heart muscling up his throat and leaping out of his mouth, bouncing off the table and landing on the ground with a wet  _ thud. _

Just like that, as if the past year hadn’t happened. 

As if Thomas was never gone.

As if his life hadn’t been ripped out from under him. 

And it is just like that that Newt’s evening is ruined completely (as if it hadn’t been already).

The sadness creeps around his shoulders like a blanket, enveloping him completely as he slides from the chair, feet planting shakily on the ground as he stands. His brain is nothing but white noise as he floats down the hall, phone and unfinished cereal left behind. The static clouds any semblance of a thought that might have passed through him as he stumbles into the bathroom, pulling open the medicine cabinet and searching with shaking hands.

Somewhere, behind it all, there is a small, small voice:  _ This isn’t going to be enough, I’m just going to sleep. It’s fine. It’s fine. _

Thirty minutes later, blinking becomes difficult and the world wavers slightly, his head a bowling ball on a slinky neck. He lies down in his bed and it feels like he is turning in on himself endlessly like a broken record skipping. He thinks he might throw up - there is a short pulse of panic that comes with this; what if he throws up in his sleep? What if he took too much? But the pull of sleep is too strong, so he does the mental equivalent of a shrug and rolls over on his side, just in case. He might ruin the carpet, but that’s better than choking on his own vomit and ruining the rest of Sonya’s life.

 

In the thick haze of his induced state, he dreams.

This time it’s a house, standing alone on an empty plot of land. It sticks out of the drab, familiar landscape like a scar, deep and infected. It is not like any house that exists in the town - grand, and old southern gothic style - and yet in the dream he feels in his bones that he knows this place; he’s been here many, many times, maybe in a Past Life. 

The grass is dry, matted down to the Earth as if cowering down in presence of the house, massive and imposing. It crunches under Newt’s feet as he advances. With each step he takes, he gets a feeling in his gut that this is  _ right _ , that this is what fate has set him out to do. But as he reaches the threshold between inside and out he stops, some unseen force keeping him there at the doorway. 

He isn’t welcome. This is where he is supposed to be, but there is something else.

_ Someone  _ else. 

He blinks and then the scene changes, house folding in on him until he is the dark, standing alone in inky blackness. The wind howls around him, whistling through the pores in his skin as it moves through him, chilling him to the core. There is a pain in his legs and he collapses, unable to move and unable to speak, heavy breaths forced out from deep inside his diaphragm and dragging on the inside of his throat, ripping over each vocal fold. He tries to call out but it’s just static, ringing hollowly in the expanse of dark. 

He has been here, for a very long time. 

 

When he awakens it’s with a start, nearly falling out of bed as he shoots straight up, head pounding with realization.

He needs to find that house.

His body is a dead weight as he stumbles to the door, legs nearly giving out along the way. He feels beyond lethargic, like the hallway is filled waist-deep with water and he’s trying to wade through it. He staggers to the side and hits a wall, nearly coming down on impact.  _ Jesus fucking christ.  _ He stops, squeezing his eyes shut tight and counting to ten. 

When he opens them, Sonya is standing at the back door, armful of dahlias and gaping openly at him.

“Bloody hell! So you’re alive, then?”

He blinks. “What?”

“Well,” she starts, raising her eyebrows as she crosses the living room, dropping the mass of flowers unceremoniously on the kitchen table, “you were asleep when I got home yesterday, and I haven’t seen you since.”

“What - what? What time is it?”

“Holy shit, Newt, did you just wake up?”

“Yes?”

“It’s four o’clock.”

He shakes his head - that can’t possibly be right _.  _ “In the… morning?”

“Yeah, ‘cause I normally do up bouquets at four in the morning.”

He kind of just stands there, watching her watching him have the world’s most efficient  existential crisis. He does the math in his head, counting backwards. If he took out the book again around nine, and then made cereal a half hour after that…

“Oh, fuck.”

Sonya grimaces slightly. “Yeah. You good?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he answers, a little too quickly. He’s only just now feeling a little less disoriented, the earth finally somewhat steady under his feet. Next time he’s having allergies and also happens to want to sleep for eighteen hours, apparently Benadryl will be his go-to. 

She doesn’t look convinced, but drops it anyway. “Alright. Wanna help me with these?”

“Sure,” he answers, because he actually really does like helping to assemble the bouquets. “Who are these going-” he starts again but lets the sentence drop off completely when his eyes land on his phone, still sitting on the table from last night. 

The dream snaps back into the forefront of his consciousness. It was fading away into the ether, exiting Newt’s mind so slowly that he didn’t even realize he was forgetting it. But the sight of his phone - what he came out here to get so that he could figure out where that house is - triggered it, re-realization hitting him like a ton of bricks.

“-going to?” Sonya tries to finish his sentence, but he shakes his head, suddenly full of nervous, shaky energy thrumming through him as he grabs his phone, searching the kitchen for his keys.

“I gotta go,” he says, neglecting to explain himself. If he takes his mind off it for even a second, he’ll forget.

“Where?”

“I just-” he spins around, something shiny catching in the corner of his eye over by the front door.  _ Keys. Car. Yes.  _ “I’ll be back later tonight, I just - there’s something I have to - I gotta go, Son.”

“Alright,” she says in a way that doesn’t sound alright. It’s more defeat than anything, like she knows that there is nothing she can do to stop Newt once he’s like this. 

The image of the house is held tenuously in his mind as he slips his shoes on, nearly falling over in the process. He may or may not call out a goodbye to his sister as he bursts out the door, scrambling into the car and peeling out of the driveway at record speed.

He goes over every detail he can remember in his mind - peeling yellow paint, turret on the right side, big window on the left. He’s just outside of town when he feels confident that it won’t slip away from him again, and it’s at this point he realizes that he has no idea where he is going. 

He feels, as he has come to be feeling quite often and quite entirely, stupid. Did he expect to just up and leave the house and feel it like some sort of beacon calling out to him? Or was he gonna just  _ know,  _ somewhere deep down in the recesses of his mind, the exact location of the house? He’s not a bloody psychic, now.

What he ends up doing, once both the anxious energy and the idiocy have been allowed to subside, is driving aimlessly around for two hours. It does not end up being as frantic as the start of his journey. The longer he’s out on the road, the more he is instilled with this eerie sense of calm, as if he will just stumble upon it-

-and maybe shockingly, maybe not, that is exactly what happens.

It is nearing dark when he drives by, which is why he almost keeps driving, not realizing right away. The sky is a deep, rich cobalt and the moon is hanging low, only the roof of the house illuminated. He does a double take and then screeches to a halt, brakes crunching horribly underneath his foot. He also doesn’t see the dirt path at first, so scarcely used that it is nearly grown over, dry patches of grass spilling over the edge like fingers, slowly reclaiming what once was theirs. It leads in a long, straight path to the front of the house, curving only slightly at the end. Thick trees line the entire side - if he’d been coming from the other way, Newt would have missed it entirely. 

With his heart pounding in his chest, he pulls onto the dirt path and inches down toward the edge of a dream and reality. 

He stops just short of where the path turns, getting out of the car with a sudden sense of fear - he’s in the middle of nowhere, at an abandoned house on the edge of some woods he doesn’t know. At night. With an almost dead phone. 

The feeling of stupid comes back, and he almost reaches for his keys again. But instead he takes another step forward, off the dirt path, and feels the grass crunching under his feet. 

It feels  _ right.  _ So, he takes another step. And then another. And then he is approaching the porch at a steady rate, fear from moments ago suddenly light years away, left behind in the dust settling into the crevices of his car. He reaches the door floating, and for just a second he is apprehensive again, sureness giving way to curiousity breaking down into hesitation once more as his hand hovers over the handle.

But this time, he will not kept away.

He walks into the house like a dream, dilapidated walls held up by sheer force of will alone. The moonlight wades in half-heartedly as Newt steps gingerly around the collection of random objects scattered on the floor, the most notable of which is a weathered bible, laying flat open, most of the words faded. He makes a point not to look at it. The front room doubles as a kitchen and dining area, only partly visible stains on the wall from where appliances presumably once inhabited, since ripped out. The counters curl inwards on themselves. Glancing down at his feet, he notices his own dragging footprints in the dust, the thin layer of it flurrying up into the air in protest of his intrusion. An unborn sneeze twitches at the front of his nose.

 

the contents of the room:

_ \- one (1) table, lopsided _

_ \- two (2) chairs, one missing a leg and laying on its side, the other upright _

_ \- four (4) teacups, no saucers, undamaged on the table _

_ \- one (1) bible, laying open in front of the entrance to the hallway _

_ \- three (3) children’s picture books, each covered in a thin film of dirt _

_ \- one (1) shoe, untied in the farthest corner of the room _

_ \- one (1) ocean of dust, mostly undisturbed _

_ \- one (1) boy, teetering on the edge of hope and delusion _

 

The opening to the hallway yawns like a chasm. Details slip and slide in and out of Newt’s vision, blackness ebbing and flowing to reveal a narrow set of stairs waiting in the darkness. Something brings him toward it, feet shuffling over the bulging floorboards, parting the sea of dust. He ignores the various bodily sensations screaming  _ bad bad bad  _ over and over: the lurch of his stomach into his throat, the low tingling in his fingertips, the frenzied beat of his heart. And yet, the closer he gets to the threshold between the front room and the hall, the calmer Newt feels - everything below his neck is showing the signs of panic he probably  _ should  _ be feeling, but his mind is just blank. With every step he feels more secure in the fact that the staircase is where he should be. Where he  _ needs  _ to be. It feels  _ right.  _

The house creaks around him as he advances, floorboards groaning under his weight. Down the hallway stretching along the right edge of the staircase, he can see another window, cracked open slightly. A dirty, torn curtain flutters softly in the breeze, wind whistling quietly. 

And then he reaches the base of the stairs, and the house falls silent. There is no creaking, no wind. The quiet is palpable, wading through the air like a thick, transparent fog. With his heart pounding in his ears, Newt feels his foot lift to rest on the first step. His hand perches on the railing, and he hoists himself up, planting his other foot on the second step. An odd energy thrums through him, like static electricity humming at his fingertips and throat. The smell of sulfur floods the room and his legs take him upwards another step, working on their own accord. The landing at the top of the stairs fades into focus as Newt slowly ascends, the outline of what is presumably the other shoe to accompany the lone one abandoned in the kitchen making itself visible in front of a tall, narrow door. The laces lie long and untied, one of them stretching underneath the closed door. The frame looks something akin to wet cardboard, mottled with dark spots and stringy mold. Newt blinks, trying to discern what the thin, fuzzy spots on the shoe could be, and then he hears a low, serpentine whisper curling up at him from behind the door:

_ Find me. _

The voice is Thomas’. There’s no question about that.

There is a second where Newt stays frozen in place, breath stuck in his throat, world stopping under his feet. Then, he surges upwards, bounding up the stairs, everything but  _ getting to that door  _ falling away behind him. 

He reaches the second-to-last step, and a cold, shivering exhale sounds from behind the door. And then-

And then Newt is falling. 

The staircase buckles underneath him, collapsing with a deafening, final groan into a heap of splintered wood. He lands upright and a deafening  _ crack  _ rings through the air as he crumbles to the ground, white-hot pain shooting up his right leg. The debris from the railing rains down on him but Newt barely notices, somehow managing to bite back a scream as he pulls his lower body from the rubble. 

It’s an act of god that allows him to drag himself across the floor and into the front room, away from the pile of wood that used to be the staircase. His leg pulsates, pain radiating from his ankle and as the dust begins to settle once more over the debris, Newt thinks he might pass out from the pain. He manages a look over his shoulder up at the doorway, silent and still shut tight. A door, with nothing out of the ordinary. For a moment Newt allows himself to entertain the thought that maybe there was no whisper, no Thomas. Maybe Teresa was right all along and he  _ is _ fucking insane, mental faculties gone out the door the second Thomas disappeared, and this just proves it.

But the air still tastes of sulfur and the hair on Newt’s arms still stands up with static electricity. He wonders if this was a warning, a punishment, or both.

(When he leans back to lie on the floor, his head rests directly beside the opened bible. There is but one paragraph wherein the words are legible. Newt blinks the words into focus and finds that he already knows them -  _ Revelation 14:6-13.  _ It is then that he knows: this is punishment.)

 

When he finally calls Minho, the conversation goes like this:

“You know it’s like, midnight, right?” Minho chooses this as a greeting and Newt can already tell this is going to be a ridiculous conversation.

There’s a pause, and then a sigh. “Min, I need you to come pick me up.”

Minho scoffs. “What happened to your car?”

“It’s - my car is fine. But I, uh,” he considers his options for a moment before biting the bullet, tone breezy and matter-of-fact as possible. “I fell down some stairs and I can’t drive and I need you to pick me up.”

“You  _ fell  _ down some  _ stairs  _ and you can’t - Newt, what?” Minho’s exasperated exhale crackles through the receiver and Newt can practically see the incredulous look contorting his features. He sighs again. “Newt, what did you do?”

Newt inhales deeply and holds back the sudden urge to laugh. Maybe he really is insane after all. “It’s - it’s kinda hard to explain over the phone, but, everything’s okay,” he says, popping his head up off the floor to take another look at his ankle that is definitely still bent at a decidedly  _ not okay _ angle.  _ Okay, ish _ , he elaborates mentally. 

There’s some noisy rustling on the other end of the line, and then, “Alright. Where am I going?”

Hm, yeah. About that: “I’m at a house.”

“You’re at a house,” Minho repeats, slowly. “Is it _ your _ house?”

“It is not.”

Minho, bless his soul: “Whose house is it, Newt?”

“Well,” he starts, rolling his head to observe the gutted kitchen, “I don’t think anyone lives here.” After this there is a long, elongated sigh on Minho’s end, and Newt closes his eyes.

“Newt.”

“Minho.”

“Do you know where you are?”

Newt hums and tries not to laugh. “Nope.” 

“Alright. Share your location with me.”

“Share my bloody-” Newt blinks. “We in the secret service now, Minho?”

“No, dumbass. On iMessage. Go to info and click ‘Send my current location’, so I can come get you. Jesus.”

“ _ Ohhhh, _ ” Newt says, pulling the phone from his ear to open his conversation with Minho. “Didn’t know you could do that, that’s helpful,” he mutters to himself.

“Are you, like, drunk right now? Are you high? What the fuck is going on?” Minho asks then, tone sharp and impatient. The shift is so sudden that Newt almost physically recoils from it, stopping himself at the last second after remembering that It Is Going To Hurt Very Much To Move. The weird, giddy feeling that had taken him over earlier deflates almost immediately. 

“No,” he answers quietly. But then again, the house still had that rotten egg smell wafting through it, so maybe there was some sort of weird toxic gas leak slowly killing him as he continued to lie there on the floor. Hey, a guy can dream.

“Jesus Christ, Newt, you’re in the middle of fucking nowhere,” Minho says then, interrupting Newt’s carbon monoxide themed death wish ponderings. “It says forty minutes away, so you’re gonna have to wait a while,” he continues, sighing once more. 

“Shit. Sorry, Min.”

“It’s fine,” he says, unconvincingly. “I’ll leave now. Just - hang in there, dude.” 

 

When Minho pulls up to the house thirty-five minutes later, Newt is sitting on the steps of the porch trying to find all the constellations Thomas taught him how to find, once upon a time. Minho looks wary and surprisingly only slightly pissed off as he gets out of his car, not saying anything but sparing a glance at Newt’s comically swollen ankle. 

The ride home is spent in complete silence, save for Newt’s reserved  _ thank you  _ he offers when he climbs carefully into the passenger seat. He opens his mouth and then closes it several times over the forty minute drive, trying to figure out how to justify this to his best friend. The longer they sit there, the more annoyed Minho looks - Newt notices he’s clenching his jaw about fifteen minutes in, and then the loud nose exhaling begins not long after that. When they reach the edges of town, just before 2:00am, Minho’s practically white-knuckling the steering wheel and Newt thinks he might die. 

Despite all of that, Minho helps him into the house when they finally pull into Newt’s driveway, securing an arm around his waist and supporting him with great care as they walk-limp their way into the house. 

Newt collapses into the kitchen table as gracefully as possible, wincing as he tries to wiggle off his shoe without moving his foot. Minho pours a glass of water and wordlessly sets it down in front of Newt before turning back to the kitchen and swearing into the freezer. 

“Why don’t you guys have any frozen peas?” He huffs, frustrated, turning back to look at a nearly teary-eyed Newt.

“Seriously?” he answers, giving Minho a look like,  _ this house hasn’t seen frozen vegetables in three years _ . 

Minho stares off into the distance for a second, confused, before realizing. “Oh. Of course.” He shakes his head and then goes back to the freezer, scanning it for a second before pulling out a ziploc of frozen pasta sauce. “This’ll have to do, then.” He puts it down on the table beside Newt’s water and tilts his chin at his ankle, now shoeless. 

“Right. Thanks,” he says, shuddering as the cold makes contact with his skin. They sit/stand there for the next couple of seconds in a thick, uncomfortable silence, neither of them willing to meet the other’s gaze. Newt looks instead at his ankle, red and puffy and bent horrifically inwards, pasta sauce ice pack held pathetically on the joint, like a bandaid on a gaping wound so deep you can see the bone. 

They’re both thinking the same thing: clearly, this is not a problem that is fixable by an ice pack - pasta sauce, peas, or otherwise. Newt needs to see a doctor. But, they both know that is not going to happen. The x-ray alone would cost at  _ least  _ four hundred dollars, let alone the following setting and plastering. Hell, it would cost an entire month’s worth of groceries just to have a medical professional take one look and say,  _ yep, that’s broken _ . And the only doctor they know who would have done it for free is on the other side of the country, for good. 

Minho almost looks like he’s gonna do something stupid like offer to pay for Newt to see someone - and he even gets so far as saying, “Listen, Newt, let’s just-” before Newt shoots him the most animous look he can muster, scowl and all. Minho just sighs and leans back against the fridge.

So, they stay in the kitchen, three functional ankles and one heavy silence collectively shared between the two of them, the inevitability of what is about to happen next waiting on the horizon.

They manage to avoid it for twenty whole minutes until Minho clears his throat.

“Newt, this needs to stop.” He says it quietly, eyes fixed on the floor.

“What?”

Minho sighs, crossing his arms. After a beat, he finally looks up, expression hardened. “It’s not going to bring him back.”

And to that Newt just blinks, because,  _ excuse me?  _ He exhales, half gasp and half laugh because, apparently, they’re having this conversation now. If he’s being completely honest with himself, Newt had seen it coming for a while now - ever since Minho’s accident. Maybe a bit before that, actually. It was possible that Teresa had gotten to him; the two of them had always had their own sort of thing, unspoken and understood. 

(A small thought, lingering in the background of betrayal: it makes Newt sick to hear himself think like this, like Teresa  _ getting to  _ Minho, as if she wasn’t their friend and some sort of infection, or a traitor. He hates that his immediate response to that is  _ but she  _ is  _ a traitor. _ He hates it, and yet.)

“I beg your bloody pardon?”  
Minho lets his head fall back to hit the fridge and closes his eyes. Newt is about to ask again, anger welling up from the pit of his stomach, when Minho glances over his shoulder and speaks again in a deliberate, quiet tone. “Going out and getting yourself hurt is not going to bring Thomas back.”

If Newt could stand, he would be across the room in a second. “You weren’t there, Minho, I’m - I’m getting closer to figuring this out,” he says. Minho rolls his eyes and Newt feels something snap deep inside of him. “Besides, what do  _ you  _ know about trying to bring him back - it’s not like you’ve been making any bloody contribution to helping look for him these past few months.” 

For just a second Minho’s jaw goes slack, but then he tilts his head, exhaling a humourless laugh. “I wasn’t there, yeah?” he starts, ignoring Newt’s second comment for the time being. “Let me guess. You saw this house in a book or a dream or some shit and you were just driving around - ‘cause that’s all you fucking ever do, now - and then you saw it so you took that as a fucking god-given sign that you had to go inside, and then you probably thought you heard him when it was just the wind or your brain supplying you with what you wanted to hear so you tried to go upstairs or whatever and then they collapsed because that house is one hundred fucking years old and you broke your ankle.” He’s flailing his arms wildly, each gesticulation like a punch to Newt’s throat. Minho stops, breathing heavily for a second, and Newt thinks he might be done but then he smiles darkly, shaking his head.

“And I bet you thought that that - oh, that that was just  _ it _ , that it was like, like, a  _ sign,  _ or whatever, from the  _ angels.  _ You got too close so they were punishing you, it was  _ them  _ who made the staircase fall because, no, the house couldn’t  _ possibly  _ have been falling apart on its own, right?” Minho takes a step forward, leaning his palms down onto the counter in front of him. “Tell me,” he says, eyes boring into Newt’s, “am I getting close?”

There is something, in that moment, that shifts between the two of them. And as Newt sits there - fuming, silent, and exposed - he knows intrinsically that it will never return to its previous state, forever changed.

Minho is not finished. 

“Oh, and yeah, I haven’t been a part of mystery fucking incorporated for the last couple months because - in case you forgot - the last time I jumped on the biblical omen train with you, I went fucking deaf.” He points violently to his left ear, adorned with a hearing aid that Newt had almost completely forgotten was there. The quiet, lingering feeling comes back to him in that moment, engulfing him in guilt. “And now you have a broken foot that’s not gonna heal properly and probably gonna make you walk with a limp for the rest of your life.”

Newt takes the makeshift ice pack off his foot and places it forcefully onto the kitchen table with a loud  _ clank _ . He opens his mouth but no words find their way out. He enters into a staring contest with Minho and tries to find the words to make him understand that there is no ‘rest of his life’ if he can’t get him back.

It’s Minho that breaks away first, shaking his head as he steps back into the kitchen, emptying his glass into the sink and putting it in the dishwasher. “You know, I miss him too.” His voice is considerably quieter, almost breaking on the  _ too.  _ Newt almost softens, deflating a bit, but then:

“Then act like it,” he spits, disdain dripping from his words. Even Newt himself is a bit surprised as Minho looks up, hurt. 

“Fuck you. Just because I’m not going off the fucking deep end,” Minho pauses for just a millisecond, the silent  _ like you  _ hanging there, not needing to be said, “doesn’t mean I’m not affected. He was my best friend. Everyone grieves differently.”

“He’s not dead!” Newt explodes, smacking the ziploc of frozen pasta sauce off the table and sending it clattering to the floor. “You sound just like her. You’re giving up on him, just like she did.”

Minho counters back just as easily. “Shut up. You don’t even  _ know  _ what you did to her. She-” he pauses, gripping the edge of the counter, inhaling loudly. “She needed you, Newt. Her  _ brother  _ disappeared and she was a fucking mess, and you just - she thought she could turn to you, but instead you called her a traitor and shut her out. Fucking hell, you made  _ me  _ shut her out. As soon as she didn’t buy into your, your - your  _ conspiracy theories  _ about her  _ missing brother _ , you made sure she had nobody left to listen to her.”

Newt notices then that he is shaking, and uses Minho’s brief pause to get out a single, venom-injected, “Fuck you.”

“No, Newt, fuck  _ you.  _ Did you ever even care about her? Did you ever even think, for one second, that losing your twin brother might be objectively worse than losing your boyfriend? Did you ever think for one second about the consequences of your obstinate  _ bullshit?  _ How they might drive her to-” Minho cuts himself off suddenly, looking at Newt with wide, angry eyes and shaking his head.

“They moved because of her mom’s job, Minho, not my - my  _ obstinate bullshit _ .”

“That’s not-” Minho stops himself again, tongue frozen at the start of another word.

Newt feels a laugh blossoming out of him then. He crosses his arms. “You sound pathetic, defending her like this like some knight in shining armour. We all know you just wanted to get into her pants.” It’s an extremely low blow and Newt almost can’t believe the words just came out of his mouth. It’s like something had possessed him.

But still, it has the expected effect, because Minho’s face drops instantly and his voice is fumbling. “That’s - that’s not-” he stumbles for words and Newt feels a hint of remorse at the back of his throat, but then the shock and hurt on Minho’s face turns into steely anger, his voice growing louder with every word. “You only ever cared about him. All those - all those years, you didn’t give a shit about me or her, did you?”

The small voice in the back of Newt’s head is screaming for him to deescalate, to go back and to refute Minho’s claim, but all he can see and feel and taste is betrayal. He doesn’t know if the words about to come out of his mouth are a lie or the truth - and he never will, because someone else beats him to it.

“What the  _ fuck  _ is going on out here?”

Sonya is hovering at the end of the hall, hands clutched to the fraying hem of Newt’s old track t-shirt. Fear and confusion are etched onto her features, and there’s a piece of her hair standing straight up that, under any other circumstance, Newt would just  _ have  _ to make fun of. 

He does not make any fun whatsoever.

The three of them stand frozen in place, Newt in his chair and Minho with his hands on the counter, not turning to meet a dishevelled Sonya’s expectant gaze. She raises her eyebrows at Newt as if to say,  _ well? _

Then, she notices the red, swollen ankle and the dust covering every inch of his body. “Bloody fucking hell, what happened to you?”

And then Newt, coldly: “Minho was just leaving.”

He looks up, wounded. He stares at Newt for three seconds that seem to stretch into eternity, his face going through a lifetime’s worth of micro-expressions. No one moves and no one breathes. Then, he lets out the world’s smallest, saddest exhale and strides out of the kitchen toward the front door, the entire house shaking violently as he slams it shut behind him. 

It is a different kind of leaving than the one they’re used to: quiet, slipping away in the night, goodbye as an afterthought if they’re lucky. Newt had grown accustomed to the people he loved falling away from him without an explanation of any sort, and he had grown to know he had no right to demand one.

He’s not sure which hurts more: the familiarity of never knowing, or the sharp newness of the abundantly clear.

What he is sure of is this: none of them are coming back.

 

Later that night, he sits on the floor of the shower and lets the water wash over the dirt caked into his skin. There’s a stray flower petal stuck on the side of the tub, probably leftover from one of Sonya’s baths. Lately she’d been into filling them up with different combinations of flowers, essential oils, and fruits, like some sort of extravagant ritual, as if she had a servant waiting in the hall for her with a cashmere robe and a glass full of cucumber water. 

He supposes that’s the point, to feel like that was something she could have someday.

But that’s a bit of silly example, a little too far-fetched, especially for Sonya. There’s no way she would ever have someone wait on her; she’s way too selfless for that. 

She really does take after their mom, even if she barely remembers her.

And if Sonya takes after their mom, then Newt definitely takes after his dad: sleeping until evening, leaving the house for hours on end without ever announcing an intention of coming back, and spitting nasty things at his friends.

He is barely inside his mind, mostly white noise, but on the fringes of his consciousness he wonders how he said those things to Minho - he doesn’t even really fully remember  _ half  _ of them, only an hour or so after he got up and slammed the front door. The fight is an absolute  blur in his mind. He doesn’t remember the things that Minho said, either. He remembers the  _ feeling  _ \- seething rage, and deep, deep hurt - but the words are just out of his reach. 

He wonders if this should worry him more than it does. 

He wonders, also, if the exact words matter in the end, or if it’s just the impact they had, sending Minho out that door for what might be a very, very long time. 

 

(He sleeps well into the afternoon of the next day, and when he wakes up there are a pair of crutches resting on the wall outside his bedroom door. )

  
  


After, Minho is there markedly less. 

It’s not just physically that he slips out of their lives, though that is maybe the most salient way that his absence takes form. By the time the trees shed the majority of their leaves, Newt stops expecting to see him at the back door everytime he looks up from doing his homework at the kitchen table. He doesn’t seek him out at lunch time; he doesn’t even bother going to their usual place, because he knows Minho won’t be there.  _ Where  _ he spends his lunch hour, Newt actually doesn’t have a single good guess. But it’s not with him.

He thinks, near the start of it, that maybe it will all blow over. Most of the time, when he snaps like that, Minho just needs time to cool off. And the amount of time he needed usually varied pretty proportionally with the amount of time he’d let the anger build up inside of him, leading ultimately to the breaking point. 

He doesn’t know at which point it transitions from cooling off into just not talking, but there’s definitely a moment when Newt realizes that this is how their friendship works now, not being a friendship at all. It’s not like Minho outright  _ ignores  _ him; he’s not that petty, but he certainly doesn’t go out of his way to be around him, either. 

At the start, it was all anger. Some residual, some seeming to be new altogether. But eventually, that just gave way to sadness. It wasn’t something Minho wore often, or in a particularly open or obvious way, but it’s something that Newt finds himself noticing, more and more from across classrooms and in passing down the hallways. It starts in the downturn of his lips, corners sloping dramatically at the ends instead of evening out gradually like his normal, neutral expression. But the real indicator - the one that scares Newt and tells him that maybe this is different, this is not anything their friendship has weathered before - is his eyes. There is something in them, not anything that Newt can consciously pinpoint or name, but something in the way they regard Newt that makes him think that to Minho, it is a lost cause.

(The Lost Cause: Either Thomas, Newt, or Newt and Minho’s friendship. Which one, exactly, will remain unknown to Newt. It is either a blessing or a curse - this is unknown, as well.)

Slowly, he becomes a regularly unregular part of their lives. Newt stops looking up obscure, horribly rated movies for them to watch each week, and Sonya stops setting aside extra of his favourite produce. He knows that she is being diplomatic. He knows that she still talks to him at school, and texts him from time to time. He knows - he  _ overheard _ , not entirely on purpose - that she tells Harriet that Minho  _ has some incredibly valid points  _ and that she’s  _ starting to get a little worried that they’re both gonna keep being stubborn idiots.  _

But she doesn’t tell him any of this, doesn’t talk about Minho to him at all. And so slowly, quietly, and without protest, he falls out of their lives, just like that.

 

Newt tries, really, really hard, not to think about how many people he has lost, through fault of his own or otherwise. 

 

There are not a lot of things in life that are easier on crutches. 

The only thing, in fact, that Newt can confidently place in the  _ easier  _ column of his list of never-ending Suck is that it’s a lot easier to get his sister to drive him places. And seeing as a week after the injury he still can’t put even the slightest amount of weight on his right foot, this is a lifesaver.

He thanks the universe for instilling her with the gift of foresight, as Newt hadn’t even thought about taking her to do her driver’s test earlier that year until she had brought it up. Because, now, if Sonya didn’t have her license, they’d pretty much be screwed. He could only go so far on crutches, and biking wasn’t really an option, either. And once the weather got colder and the snow settled in, neither of those would work anyway. Thomas obviously wasn’t there to drive him around, and neither was the rest of his family.

And clearly, Minho wasn’t going to be his chauffeur.

If Sonya couldn’t drive, then Newt couldn’t go to work. If Sonya couldn’t drive, then she couldn’t sell her crop at the farmer’s market each month, nor could she get her deliveries around town in a reasonable time once the snow hit.

It’s a good fucking thing that Sonya can drive.

By the time Halloween hits, the two of them manage to settle into a routine. It means that Newt has to actually go to school now, which is almost like some kind of sick irony - the entire reason he got hurt in the first place was because he went out alone, and he went out alone because he and Minho were fighting about him not going to school. 

He supposes he deserves it, in a way.

Sonya is utterly gracious, in that way she always is. Well, almost always. There are moments where he can sense that she is getting fed up at him getting fed up at everything, but, as she’s been doing more and more lately, she keeps her mouth shut. 

 

One day in November he asks her how she got the car back from the house, all the way out in the middle of nowhere. For the almost month since it had happened, it hadn’t once occurred to him that he’d left his car stranded when Minho came to get him that night.

“Minho drove me out to get it,” is her answer, which is not what he was expecting. It’s not exactly surprising either, but it is nice. Kind of like,  _ huh, okay.  _ Kind of like, maybe, just maybe, all hope wasn’t completely lost.

“Oh. Really?”

“Yeah.” 

He can tell from the tone of her voice that she doesn’t  _ really  _ want to talk about it, and he can’t blame her. He can only imagine how that forty-minute car ride went. He wants to be annoying and ask her about it, to push, but then he remembers the countless times that she’s trusted him enough not to push. And maybe her trust had been misplaced, but it was still trust.

“That was nice of him.”

“Yeah, it was.”

 

The first weekend of December brings them a thick blanket of snow and a muddling of anxieties. 

“I didn’t think we were gonna get snow this soon.” Sonya is chewing on the end of her braid, a habit from when she was young - well, young _ er _ \- that only came back to manifest the most unsettling of her worries. “I don’t know if the asparagus is going to last.” She exhales curtly and then turns her head to look at Newt dramatically. “This town fucking loves its asparagus.”

He snorts soundlessly and looks up from the comically massive pot on the stove in front of him, still stewing. “I know, it’s a little weird.”

“And I don’t have enough fertilizer to do the whole crop again. It just - I  _ should  _ have got some when it was on sale last week, but now we’re gonna have to wait till the end of the month when it goes on special again and I really don’t think that-”

“Hey, hey,” he interrupts, “If it comes to that, we’ll find the money to get more fertilizer. It can’t be more than what, an extra three dollars? We can do three dollars, Son.” For a second he thinks that he’s succeeded in winding her down, but then she peels away from the window, leaning against the counter with an urgent sigh.

“But it’s not just that, Newt. We also need to keep the heat on so we don’t freeze to death, and we need to make sure we have some extra stored away in case something happens to the car ‘cause we don’t have Winter tires,” she swings her arms wildly, getting more and more worked up as she goes on, “ _ and _ I’ve never driven on ice before, so if I fuck up even once then we’re absolutely screwed. And we  _ also  _ need to be saving even more because you’re graduating this year and if you want - if you want to do, you know, school  _ after  _ that then-”

“Sonya,” he says, voice quieted by the welling of tears in her eyes, “you know - you know I’m not, like,  _ going  _ to college, right? You know that I can’t - that we can’t-”

“I know.” She looks away, shaking her head. “I know that, I just thought - I don’t know.” She lets out a long, shaky breath and looks him in the eye, the saddest thing Newt’s ever seen. “I thought that maybe for once we could - I don’t know, we could pretend that, like, there was  _ one  _ aspect of our lives that wasn’t completely fucking  _ other _ . You know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She pushes herself off the counter, running her hands through her hair. “Like I guess for now we could use a compost mixture, but we barely produce enough of that as it is. You don’t even  _ eat  _ anymore, for starters, which is saying a lot because you didn’t even really eat before, and-”

“ _ Son. _ ” The sudden change in tone feels like whiplash, and all of a sudden she has gone from defeated to bitter accusation, a the scarcest hint of hysteria filtering through. It is with this that Newt already knows that he will not be escaping the oncoming storm.

“I mean, really, Newt. You don’t - you wake up too late to ever eat breakfast, and I’m almost positive you don’t even bring a lunch to school. I see you, when I’m sitting out in the courtyard with my friends. Sometimes you just  _ leave,  _ and I’m pretty sure you don’t come back.”

Newt feels himself shrinking in on his shoulders. It’s dumb, because he definitely should’ve, but he hadn’t realized how much she had been paying attention. In that moment he feels very small, like he’s been shoved in between two glass slides and put under a microscope for the rest of the world to see. 

“This is exactly it - you’re just like them, everyone  _ watching  _ me,” he deflects, words coming out a bit snappier than intended. But once it’s out he realizes that it’s true, and that maybe -  _ maybe  _ \- he can deal with complete strangers doing it, but not his sister. “I just - I just can’t, okay?”

He’s not sure exactly what he’s talking about anymore: the eating or the being watched. He can tell that Sonya doesn’t know which he’s referring to either, but it doesn’t matter because at the same time they both realize that the statement would be true regardless. 

She sighs and then pushes herself off the counter without a word, pulling out a knife and beginning to chop onions into small chunks. Newt deflates, wishing that he could just call it a night and go to bed, starting over again in the morning and pretending that this conversation never happened. 

Instead, he takes out a spoon and dips it in the soup, making sure to get a chunk of carrot, not quite soft yet but still partially cooked. Sonya puts down her knife, and as if on instinct she moves toward the stove, hand halfway to being held out for the spoon. But then Newt brings it to his lips. Sonya blinks, opens and then shuts her mouth, watching him swallow. 

“It’s pretty good,” he concludes after a second or two. “But it’s definitely gonna need those onions.”

It’s not much, but it’s something. It’s trying.

She smiles.

 

He finishes out the semester with near failing marks. It’s the most atrocious report card he’s gotten to date, but it’s not like they can ask his parents to sign it. Near failing means not  _ failing  _ failing, so he’s in the clear. He walks out of his exams - he  _ walks _ , yes, finally - not knowing if he’s going to pass any of his classes, so it’s a pleasant surprise when he does.

The first week of the new semester brings along his birthday, which feels uncomfortably marked by the new absences in his life. At one point in the day, shortly after the sun goes down, he remembers the barrage of Firsts he’d experienced without Thomas, so many that he has now moved onto Seconds. The thought of that makes him sick, so his brain moves instead to the fact that this is now the First birthday not spent with both Teresa and Minho.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t make him feel any better.

But it does give him and idea.

He puts on a jacket and boots, grabbing a scarf as an afterthought as he slips quietly out the front door. The cold is biting, but the air is still. The snow squeaks as it crunches under his feet, packed down densely from weeks of people walking over it. It’s an annoying sound, especially with the uneven rhythm of his steps, an awkward sort of one-two that’s just delayed enough to be noticeable. It’s gotten a bit better since he’s been off crutches, but not by much.

It’s not too hard to ignore, though, in the hazy cold of dusk. He’s grateful for the almost automatic static in his mind, noisy and blank and suppressing how bad of an idea he thinks -  _ knows _ \- this is.

When he walks into the seven eleven, he goes straight to the counter.

“I’d like a packet of cigarettes, please.”

The cashier - apparently this store’s  _ only  _ cashier, because Newt’s only ever seen this one over the years he’s been coming here - gives him an overwhelmingly skeptical once over, then glances to his right where a sign about the legal purchasing age of tobacco hangs threateningly. “ID?” he asks, in a way that makes Newt pretty sure he’s completely dead inside. 

He takes out his wallet and struggles to get his driver’s license out of the slot but eventually manages, sliding it over the counter towards the cashier. He picks it up and holds it close to his face, squinting at the date in the bottom right corner and then up at Newt, eyebrows raised. Newt’s about to make a remark about how much he knows he looks like a child, but then the cashier hands it back to him, seemingly satisfied.

“Happy birthday,” he mumbles, turning around to open the case of tobacco products. Newt blinks and realizes that this is only the second time he’s heard those words today.

(The first was Sonya, of course, that morning right after he’d woken up. There was a vase of tiger lilies and a second edition copy of  _ To Kill A Mockingbird  _ waiting on the counter for him, and a big hug right after his first sip of tea.)

“Man.” The cashier’s voice is impatient, and Newt snaps back into the present to seem him waiting there expectantly. “Which ones?”

_ Shit.  _ Newt hadn’t thought this far ahead. Part of him didn’t actually believe that he’d be  _ allowed  _ to buy them, despite being eighteen years old. “Uh, whatever,” he settles on, which is just about the lamest thing he could have possibly said. The guy rolls his eyes and turns back to the case, picking a white box with red letters. “And a lighter.”

“They’re in front of you.”

Newt looks down, and sure enough there’s a plastic container filled with different coloured lighters. “Oh.”

“That all?” Apparently, Newt’s really pissed him off now, because his lips are pressed together in a thin line and his arms are crossed. The man - guy? He really couldn’t be that much older than Newt himself, plus he’s pretty sure he saw him around the halls at school when he was a bit younger. He gets out a  _ yeah  _ while sneaking a glance at the guy’s name tag in the process -  _ Alby.  _ Maybe that’s why he’s so grumpy all the time, with a name like that. Then again,  _ Newt  _ isn’t exactly on this year’s list of top ten baby names, either. At least  _ his  _ shitty name is by choice.

(He wonders briefly, how he’s never cared to check the dude’s name in all the past times he’s been there, and that ever present guilt comes rushing in again for just a moment.)

He hands over a ten dollar bill and Alby gives him three dollars back - cigarettes are bloody  _ expensive.  _ He definitely doesn’t have the money to make this any sort of habit, but the idea that’s been lurking at the back of his mind doesn’t require that anyway.

The thing about fingers, is that Newt never thought they would ruin his life. 

Since he messed up his leg, he’s been doing a lot of thinking in place of expeditions. He’s gone over all the evidence, scoured through Thomas’ book for the slightest clue. He’s rearranged the web of yarn on his wall until it was nothing but one massive tangle, having to start over again. But his mind has always lingered on the idea of balance, circling back time and time again to the fingers and the scales - to the idea of reparations.

He fishes the lighter out of the bag, flicking it a few times to see if it works. 

(Left hand: pinky, ring finger, and first knuckle of middle.)

He tears the thin plastic off the carton and pulls out a single cigarette, twirling it in his fingers.

(They came off so easily. There were even little crumbles of stone in his palm.)

He lights it without too much difficulty, bringing it up to his lips and taking a single, coughing drag. The taste is horrific. His lungs feel like they’re shrivelling up. 

(The next day, they were gone.)

Then, he takes the cigarette and gently shoves the burning end of it into the skin between the knuckles of his pinky finger, twisting back and forth as it scorches his skin.

And that, he supposes, is how that starts. 

Despite everything, things somehow find a way to be relatively calm for the next couple of months. 

With Spring comes an influx of damp, foggy mornings. There aren’t any more messages or dreams, but Newt feels it in his bones that Thomas is near; he feels that Thomas is watching, looking over him. He makes an effort to go to school, if for nothing else but to see Sonya look over at him from the other side of the courtyard and smile at lunch time. 

Work is as fine as it always is. Mary doesn’t bring up his mother again, and doesn’t make any extensive comments on the books he chooses to fill his free time reading. He’s almost halfway through the bible - it probably wouldn’t be taking him as long if he wasn’t stopping to scribble notes every couple of pages or so, but his progress is decent enough. Alongside that he starts skimming through books on the early religions of the Americas, just for something different. None of them are particularly angel-heavy, but he knows that meaning can strike in the most unexpected of places.

 

Sometime in March, Sonya casually mentions that Minho asked about him the day before when she’d dropped off his and his mom’s vegetable order. 

“He noticed you were limping the other day,” she says, voice level, as if she was focusing on his reaction, trying to gauge.

“Oh,” he replies, careful, solely because he notices that she is watching him. “Alright.”

It feels like, maybe, not every terrible thing he has done has to be permanent.

It rains for the first week of April, seven days straight. School gets cancelled for three days because of flooding, and he spends two of them helping Sonya make sure their crop for the season isn’t ruined, which is a less than cheerful mission. They’re lucky - the east side is at the top of the slope their town sits on. If it was flipped, they would have been beyond fucked. The west side of town is interspersed with these murky puddles, shin-deep and full of random pieces of trash that have washed down from the east. 

The community centre organizes a cleanup the day after the rain stops - Newt and Sonya show up decked out in their dad’s old fly fishing gear, ready to spend the afternoon without water squelching beneath their feet with every step they take. At one point, Minho materializes across the street, leading another small group of people their age. When he and Newt’s gazes cross each other at the same time, he lifts his hand up in a ghost of a wave. 

He spends a lot of his nights coming back to the book, running his fingers over Thomas’ words and drawings. It almost becomes a ritual - taking the book from the drawer of his desk and taking a moment just to feel the weight of it in his hands, to imagine Thomas doing the same; setting it down on his desk, the pages always fanning open to the same place, where he taped in some pressed flowers from one of their hikes with Teresa and Minho, wildflowers that Newt had picked and woven into Thomas’ hair, longer then; carefully flipping back to the start, going over each of the pages one by one, mumbling the words to himself like gospel, long since burned into his memory.

And every time he idles the longest on the last set of pages, the ones left blank, unfinished. The way his chest falls when he gets to the back cover, nothing changed, tells him that he must be hoping for a different result, somewhere down in his subconscious. He’s not sure what he’s expecting to happen - it’s not like the book is going to talk to him, or magically have Thomas’ location appear on the page out of thin air - but then again, his current working theory is that he was kidnapped by angels, so he supposes that anything goes.

(Anything goes = he will entertain every possible avenue, even if it means checking a notebook for magically appearing clues, if he has even the slightest feeling that it might help him figure out how to bring Thomas home.)

As graduation approaches and he starts to lose track of all the Firsts and Seconds, Newt feels himself missing Teresa more than usual. She had left at a bit of a weird point in their relationship, where things were kind of settled but not entirely, but it had seemed to be getting better in the months since her family’s departure. At least, in Newt’s opinion. 

When the whole blowout with Minho had happened, he’d kind of fell out of the routine of being in touch with her out of - out of shame? Avoidance? Not wanting to deal with it and make it real? He’s not sure what exactly it is, but in hindsight, it had stopped him from talking to anyone but Sonya for a solid couple of months. Which obviously isn’t healthy, or ideal, but when has that ever been his first concern?

Regardless, he seems to be past that weird patch and is on the upward climb to being something that at least resembles a normal person. He remembers this time last year, when he was all about trying to be a good friend.

He thinks it’s about time to give it another shot.

“Hey, it’s good to see your face.” Teresa smiles at him through the computer screen, sitting cross legged on her bed. There’s a collage of photos on the wall behind her, framing her head almost like a halo. Newt recognizes almost all of them. 

He smiles back, heart filling up at the sight. “Hey, you too. Wow.”

“How’ve you been?”

Newt blinks. “I mean. Uh…”

“Shit, sorry, dumb question.” She shakes her head and grimaces, and Newt realizes that she’s just as worried about this being awkward as he is. It’s oddly comforting.

“No, no, it’s okay. I, uh. Things have been? Better, I guess? Like, not really, but relatively? If that makes sense?”

She smiles a sad little smile. “No, I get it.” She wraps her cardigan tighter around her shoulders, then looks up again. “So. How are things with Minho?”

He hums and then sighs. “I’m sure you know, playing both sides and all that.” It actually comes out as light and breezy as he’d intended, almost a joking kind of tone.  _ Nice. _

She scoffs. “Oh, well you know I wouldn’t actually pick  _ sides  _ in this stupid little thing you guys have going on.”

“Stupid?!”

“Okay, not stupid. You both have very valid reasons to be upset with each other, but Newt. It’s been  _ months _ . Make up already. You’re  _ Newt and Minho,  _ for god’s sake.”

This makes him feel very, very sad all of a sudden, because she’s right. This is by far the longest they’ve ever been, well, like they are now, and definitely the first time Newt’s not been one hundred percent sure it would all blow over. Usually, if he was going through this sort of thing, Minho was the person he’d talk to about it.

But obviously, that’s not an option right now.

He sighs. “I know. It’s - he’s started, like, nodding to me in the hallways. That’s a good sign, right?”

“I’d say so” she says encouragingly. Newt can tell that she knows more to Minho’s side of the story, but is trying to be diplomatic. Sonya comes to mind. “Look, Newt. Obviously I’m not going to just, tell you everything he says-”

“-Oh, no, I wouldn’t expect you to-”

“-and obviously same goes for the other way around, but. I think you guys are almost there. You need to be the one to suck it up and apologize.”

“Why me?” The questions leaps incredulously from his lips before he can stop it, hating how much he sounds like a whining child.

Teresa is ready to counter. “Why you? Newt, come on. Min didn’t tell me specifics, but he paraphrased, and it seems like you said some pretty terrible fucking stuff to him.” She emphasizes  _ pretty fucking terrible stuff  _ and tilts her head slightly, which causes him to realize exactly which pretty fucking terrible things she’s referencing, the ones pertaining to her and Minho’s intentions with her pants. But she seems to have made peace with it, at least for herself, because then she sighs and adds, “Things aren’t just gonna go back to the way they were without an apology.”

_ Back to the way they were.  _ Newt wonders what, exactly, that means. Back to the four of them spending hours biking around town and watching movies in Thomas and Teresa’s basement? Back to Thomas’ absence being fresh and terrifying, none of them having a clue what’s going on? Back to Newt and Teresa constantly at odds? Back to what? Suddenly it doesn’t feel like anything can ever go  _ back,  _ only hurtling ever forwards as everything Newt once loved is left behind in the dust of everything he’s ruined.

(There’s a lot of overlap, there.)

But in essence, Teresa is right. As much as he wants to keep being a stubborn little kid, he can’t do that anymore; he’s eighteen now, and almost out of school. He can’t keep acting like this when he has Sonya to look after. And as much as they’ve been trying in the past months, he knows that they can’t do this thing alone. If he wants any semblance of a friendship of Minho, he’ll have to swallow his pride and own up to what he’s done to their relationship.

“I know,” he admits, and then, because he’s still not quite done being selfish:

“But he - Teresa, the things he said to me. The things he said about  _ Thomas _ -”

“I know what he said about Tom,” she interrupts, voice calmer than Newt would’ve expected. The connection either freezes or she is entirely still for a moment, unblinking, before- “and you can bet your ass I chewed him out appropriately. Remember, not picking sides. And I’m not - I’m not giving up on him, either, Newt. I know it might be hard for you to believe that, but it’s true.” Her voice goes soft and she slumps a bit, looking unbelievably sad. 

An emotional chameleon, that girl.

And because he’s trying the whole maturity thing:

“I know.” Even if he doesn’t believe it just yet, the tiny smile that appears on her face is worth it. It feels like, finally, a truce.

Teresa sniffles quietly, laughing to herself. “God, I miss him.” The laughter turns sad again and tears well up in her eyes. “I miss him so much.”

Newt almost shatters in two. “I know, me too.”

“Any more messages on your end?” The question takes him off guard and it takes a second for him to process that she means  _ messages.  _

Maybe, she really _ hasn’t  _ given up on Thomas.

“Oh,” he says, the ability of speech not quite in reach yet. He blinks, remembering how little she wanted to do with the messages last year. Then, he laughs. 

Teresa frowns in surprise, then starts laughing herself, through the tears. “What?”

“Well, the day you guys left, the room in my light exploded.”

“Oh, oh my god,” she holds her hands over her mouth, trying to quell the laughter that could now probably be considered inappropriate, given the situation. Newt couldn’t care less.

“Yeah, and after that, I broke my leg because I thought he was in an abandoned house, so.” The laughter is contagious and soon enough he can’t stop either, dwelling in just how ridiculous it all sounds.

Teresa manages to pull it together, then pulls her laptop closer onto her lap. “Shit, yeah, how’s your leg? That’s - that was the night when everything with Minho-”

“Yeah, yeah. The very one.” He buries his head in his hands, getting out the last dregs of the giggles possessing him. “It’s, uh, well. I don’t have to use crutches anymore.”

“So it’s healed, then?”

“Erhm.” 

“It’s not healed?”

He wouldn’t count constant aching and walking with a limp as  _ healed,  _ but it’s as healed as he’s going to get, so.

“It’s mostly healed.”

Her face drops. “Newt, tell me you went to a doctor.” He looks away. He can’t meet her gaze. He can’t. It’s not like she’d be able to understand, anyway, and he digs his fingernails into his calves, out of frame, to remind himself not to hold that against her.

“You went to a doctor and got it xrayed and set and cast, right?”

He keeps his eyes down.

The hysterical almost-euphoria of moments before comes crashing down, Teresa lowering her voice, eyes wide. “ _ Newt. _ ”

He sighs, finally ripping his eyes up from his keyboard, like a bandaid from skin. “You know that wasn’t an option, Reese.” He tries not to sound too accusatory, or too exasperated, or too  _ anything.  _ He’s too tired to turn it into a whole thing, all over again. 

It’s like she can sense that, because all she says, quiet and sad, is, “I’m sorry.”

And he knows, in that moment, that she really is.

“I wish everything was different.” It’s so low that Newt almost doesn’t catch it. He doesn’t know if it’s meant for him, but he responds anyway.

“Me too.”

Neither of them talk for a minute or two. It’s a nice silence, shared finally between two friends and not strangers. For the first time, Newt realizes that it’s possible for each of them to have their separate ways of coping with what’s happened, and that can be alright. 

Teresa is four words into the start of a goodbye when an urgent need begins to pulse within Newt’s chest.

“Well, I should probably-”

“Teresa, I need to ask you something.” She must know from the calm evenness of his voice that this is something important, because she stops immediately, all of her attention directed toward the screen.

And almost like she already knows, she swallows thickly. “Yeah?”

It’s not him that says the following words, but some force from deep inside him. “I need you to tell me what you know about my mom.”

“Oh.” It’s more of an exhale than a word, the rest of her deflating as it leaves her lips. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them, she looks  _ scared.  _

“I know that she - she used to be obsessed with the angels, just like Thomas. I know that he used to whisper her name in his sleep sometimes.”

She smiles, faraway, almost fondly. “Beth.”

“Yeah.” That one word is like a punch to the chest, and his eyes begin to burn.

Teresa is checked out for another second or two before she blinks again, smile fading as she comes back to the present. “I don’t - I don’t have all the answers, but I know some of it. There’s a lot Thomas could do that I couldn’t, and there was a lot he didn’t tell me.”

Newt’s not sure if this should come as a surprise to him, but it does. He nods, signalling for her to go on. 

She takes a deep breath, working herself up to it. He waits patiently, fingertips tingling in nervous anticipation. He only has bits and pieces of everything that’s happened, especially when it comes to his mom. This might be the only moment he has before his world comes crashing down all over again.

“We started hearing them around the time your mom died. For me it was just glimpses - little things, like feeling like a presence was there or individual words, phrases. It was never attached to any of them in particular, just -  _ from them _ , y’know? But for Tom, it was different. He could, like,  _ talk _ to them. I begged him to teach me how - eight year old me, asking him to ask the angels if they thought I was pretty. God, I can only imagine what our parents were thinking.”

“They never asked you about it?”

“No, not really. I think they just thought it was a twin thing. Or that, like, catholic school was rubbing off on us. It was just our thing. Anyway, he always talked about this one, this angel named Beth. She was his favourite. Called her his guardian angel.”

Newt tries not to cry. “My mom.”

“Yeah. He didn’t - we didn’t know that, though. After a while she got quiet. They all got quiet, so we sort of forgot about them, I think. We were kids. And, uhm. So, it was whatever for a while, but then around - I think? Grade nine? She came back. But this time, it was - it was  _ scary,  _ Newt. You know the stuff with the radios, and the phones? It was that. We could tell she was mad, but we didn’t know why. And Thomas - I’m sure, as you know, got kind of obsessed.”

There is something resembling a laugh that comes out of him, bitter and humourless. “Oh, I know.” Teresa looks about ready to start up again, but then Newt’s blood runs cold. “Wait.”

“What?”

“She came back and she was mad this time, right?”

“Yeah. Something was wrong.”

“And you said ‘round grade nine?”

“Yeah, I think it was just before exams in January.”

His mom, coming back to this realm, angry about something happening in January of grade nine. “Jesus fucking christ.”

“What?”

“That’s when my dad left. Disappeared. Whatever.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah. Do you think - do you think that has something to do with it?”

She brings her hand up to her mouth, fingernails already chewed down. “Maybe,” she says, “Maybe, actually. I don’t know. We didn’t - I didn’t know it was her. I don’t know if Thomas did, but it he did he never told me about it. I only clued in a month or two before he, uh. You know. When he was getting really bad, he was drawing a lot more. And one of his sketches-”

“Looked just like mum. Yeah, there were a couple in that book you gave me.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah. I knew I’d seen her somewhere before, but it wasn’t until we went to your house - that time Sonya got really into astrology and asked us all to come over so she could read our charts - and I saw the photo of you guys and your parents when you were younger hanging in the hall. But I didn’t know about any of the stuff about her being obsessed like Thomas, that’s news to me.

“And so, when Thomas disappeared, and you said you were hearing him through the radio and all that, I was. I remember you were just so angry with me, ‘cause you thought I didn’t care and didn’t believe you, but it was really just-”

“You thought he was dead.”

Her face is watery, seconds away from bursting. She sniffles loudly and nods, squeezing her eyes shut. “I didn’t know how to tell you that without telling you everything else, and it was all so messy that I just - I couldn’t - god, I don’t even know. I just couldn’t deal with any of it.”

“Reese,” he says softly, his own tears threatening to spill over. He feels his chest caving in, a flood of guilt rushing into the gaping chasm there.

“And it’s not your fault,” she says, reading his mind, “I would have reacted the same if the roles were reversed. It was wrong of me to keep it from you, but I just didn’t know how to tell you.”

“No, no. It wasn’t wrong, it was - the situation was so much more messed up than I even knew, and you were dealing with it alone. I should have been there for you instead of shutting you out.”

She smiles through the tears then, gasping/sobbing/laughing. “It’s okay. We both handled it pretty poorly, I guess.”

“Yeah, we really did.” They have another moment of shared laughter, bordering on hysteric. They calm down after a minute or two, and Newt wipes his nose on the sleeve of his sweater. “So, uhm. When he - when he called, that day. He was talking about my mom, not you.”

_ I’m sorry. I don’t think I can save her.  _

“Yeah,” she confirms, nodding. “So that - that made me think, like. If he can’t save her, what makes us think that we can save him?”

“No,” he says, speaking before he can think, “we can. We have to - something’s  _ coming,  _ Teresa, I can feel it. We’re going to get him back.”

She takes a long, shivering inhale, and tries on the world’s smallest smile. “You really think so?”

“I have to.”

 

The next day after school, he catches sight of Minho, track pants and team t-shirt, on his way to practice.

“Minho,” he says before he can stop himself, some entity much braver than him temporarily taking control of his vocal chords. Minho stops and turns around slowly, staring blankly over at Newt. 

He waits for whatever divine force to make him speak again, to make him say the right words that will fix all of this, but evidently he’s on his own from here on out. He takes a breath.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry, for everything.” Oh, so apparently he’s  _ doing this  _ doing this. 

Minho raises his eyebrows and shifts his weight from one leg to another. Other than this his expression doesn’t change, which Newt knows could be a sign in either direction, good or bad. 

He shoves his hands in his pockets and awkwardly closes the distance between them, so that whatever’s left of the student body doesn’t have to hear their conversation. “I said - the things I said to you, that night, they were, uh. Pretty fucking terrible,” he admits, using Teresa’s words.  The thought of her, encouraging smile and plain honesty, urges him to go on. “I was, uhm, obviously, really upset about Tommy and everything and when you said that it wasn’t going to bring him back, like he was already - no, you know what, none of that is an excuse. I was upset but I shouldn’t have treated you like that. I’m sorry.”

For the first time in the entire exchange, Minho opens his mouth. He ends up closing it, then opening it again, a few more times, before he finally settles on, “Thank you. For, uh, apologizing.”

“You’re, uh, welcome?”

There’s a second where it hangs in the air and then they both crack a smile, revelling in the awkwardness of it all.

“Listen, Newt,” Minho starts again, pulling on the straps of his backpack, “I - I said some pretty messed up stuff that night too. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, my pleasure.”

“I was just - I know I didn’t really act like it, and I guess I still don’t, but that day out on the hill really messed me up, man. I was scared, constantly. And when you called me and said that you hurt yourself, I just. I don’t know. I kinda snapped, I guess. I can’t lose you, too.”

And if that’s not irony, Newt doesn’t know what is.

He continues. “‘Cause, like, it kinda feels like everytime we try to - everytime we try to find him, or figure out what’s going on, we get knocked down pretty fucking hard. And I don’t think - Newt, you need to be more careful-” he lowers his voice, eyes darting around for a second- “I feel like you underestimate what  _ they’re  _ capable of, and if you don’t change that you’re gonna get killed sooner or later. I’m sorry I couldn’t make myself stick around to watch that happen.”

He perks up at them mention of  _ them _ , feeling like cheering on the spot when he realizes that Minho hasn’t given up completely after all. 

“Actually, we think it’s might be my mom.”

Minho does a textbook double-take. “Your - Newt, what?”

“I know. It’s - there’s a lot you missed, Min.” He starts to smile, just a little bit, but then Minho frowns and the cautious elation drains out of him before it’s even started.  _ Shit.  _

“I - okay, listen, if we’re gonna do this, I need to, to  _ not _ , not talk about that, for at least. Newt, Jesus. Your  _ mom _ ?”

He tries not to let his face fall all the way to the floor. “Okay, yeah, yeah, that’s - I get it,” he lies, fingers flying to his pocket on their own accord, searching for the lighter he already knows isn’t there. “We can just - yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no. It’s all good.”

“Okay. Well, I better get going. I, uh - practice.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“See you around, Newt.”

“See ya.” 

The conversation is clunky and stilted, and it stings because things used to be so easy between them and they’re quite obviously still not on the exact same page, but:

It’s a start.

 

There comes a point, not long after this, that Newt realizes he and Sonya, now, are slightly out of synch. It’s like there’s some kind of barrier between them, one that neither of them quite knows how to figure out.

It’s new, it’s weird, and he doesn’t like it.

It stops being unspoken on a Wednesday night, one where he decides he’s more fed up than sad and can’t have another night sitting hunched over his desk, waiting for something to jump out at him from between the lines of Thomas’ notes.

He puts the book away and goes to his dad’s room. 

In the closet there’s a cardboard box, and in that box are piles of photo frames. He knows which one he’s looking for - small and square, gold with some simple carvings along the edges. It ends up being wedged in up against the side of the box, and with some careful maneuvering he pulls it out without anything collapsing. He pulls it in close to his chest and nudges the box back into the closet with his foot, an ordeal that’s only slightly less painful than he’d been expecting.

Back in the safety of his room, he sits back at his desk and finally pulls the frame away from him, taking a breath and flipping it over. 

Staring back at him, is his mother.

It almost feels weird, almost out-of-body, knowing what he knows now. The woman in the photo - who he has so few memories with, so many of which are already fading, morphing and warping under the stress of age - has almost taken on an entirely new identity, like she was living a double life he never knew about. He supposes she  _ was _ , if what Mary told him was true. He’s tried, for nearly a full year now, to remember his mom ever mentioning the angels. He’s scoured the house, gone through every drawer and every corner of his parents room, but there is nothing. 

There’s a fair amount of dust sitting on the glass, which gets on his fingers when he flips it over again, unscrewing the backing. He removes it carefully, then peels the picture off the glass. On the back, there’s some writing in the corner, cursive and done in pencil:  _ Liz, ‘97.  _ It’s strange, thinking about his mom - how she had an entire life before he was born, a life that he knows so very little about. 

He puts her picture in the middle of his desk, pulls out some scrap paper and a marker, and starts writing down what he knows. 

It’s later, after dinner, that he realizes that it’s exactly this that is the barrier.

“Your hair has gotten really long,” Sonya tells him as he’s washing the dishes, hands perched under her chin as she blinks over at him from the kitchen table. She doesn’t need to say  _ and I’m going to braid it now,  _ because they both already know.

Five minutes after this statement he is sat down in front of the couch, cross legged as she sits up on the cushion, fingers running softly over his scalp. He hadn’t been paying much attention to his hair lately, but as Sonya crosses the strands over each other, he realizes just how much its grown in the past while. Back in grade ten, Teresa took a hairstyling class as her elective, and had repeatedly summoned Newt out of his third period French class to use as a guinea pig on new trimming techniques - which resulted in, surprisingly, some pretty okay haircuts. She promised to keep it up after the semester ended, but then Thomas disappeared, and making sure Newt’s hair stayed at an acceptable length was not very high on anyone’s list of priorities.

Now, it curls down well under his ears, just short of his chin. It wasn’t yet long enough to pull back into a ponytail or anything of the sort - which, to his credit, he  _ had  _ noticed that, because it was just starting to get annoying when it fell in his eyes - but when Sonya pulls it over to the side, he finds himself pleasantly unencumbered. 

She starts over several times, clearly not going for speed or neatness here. It’s more the act of it, seeing what styles his length can manage, how well his hair holds the braid. He’s seen her do it on both Teresa and herself a million times, so much that he never bats an eye at the sight of bobby pins clenched between teeth or elastics covered in hair left astray around the house, but it feels weird to be the one getting it done. 

It’s nice, to sit there and not have to think. He can feel them slipping into the familiarity of each other once more, as if the weirdness of before was just a bump, far off in the distance behind them. 

A little while later, her voice stuns him out of his relaxed trance, lower and more strained than he would have expected. “Stay here, I’m gonna go get some flowers.” He moves to look and see if he can read her face to map what’s happening with her voice, but she’s already turned away and opening the back door, slipping out without another word as she slides it shut behind her.

He frowns. The feeling comes back, like a pit in his stomach. 

Her face is neutral when it appears once more on the other side of the glass, eyes downcast toward the handful of baby’s breath she holds. 

“Flower time,” she says, a tiny smile appearing on her lips before she sits back down on the couch, folding her legs back up under her. “Don’t move.”

Newt complies, only moving his head when she tilts it this way and that, weaving the delicate stems through the folds of the braids, adjusting with a feather-light touch. This continues on, half peaceful, half heavy, for the next couple minutes until Sonya removes her hands from his hair, sighing audibly.

“You can tell me, you know.” Her voice is soft, and sad - so, so sad - and Newt starts, turning around and swivelling his hips so he’s facing her, looking up at his sister, who in turn keeps her eyes trained on her lap.

“Whatever it is - whatever you’ve been keeping in, you can tell me.”

And it’s then that he realizes she knows, without even knowing. 

She sniffles, and then continues. “Like, you know that I’m here with you on this, right? Through - Newt, through  _ anything.  _ I will be right here beside you.”

“I know that,” he says, automatically, even if the next immediate reaction in his brain is  _ no, I can’t.  _ “I know, Son.”

He knows that, he supposes, in theory, but he doesn’t know if he can bring himself to do it in practice - Sonya never really knew their mom. She doesn’t talk much about it, but he’s sure that she has an image of who she was and what she was like. He’s sure he wishes she  _ knew _ \- but if she knew what  _ he  _ knew? What Teresa knew? What Thomas  _ knows _ ?

Newt isn’t sure he could ever forgive himself for taking away whatever semblance of innocence his baby sister has left. This is the one thing, in all of this, that she has to hang onto. 

So, instead:

“I talked to Minho last week.”

She blinks, eyebrows shooting up. “Oh?”

“Yeah, it was - it was good, I think.”

The tiniest laugh leaves her lips, noiseless. “Did you apologize?”

“Actually, yes. I did.”

She’s silent for a second, nodding silently. “Well, shit. Took you guys long enough.”

He sighs.

“No, but really - that’s really good, Newt.”

“Thanks.”

After a second, she digs into the pocket of her hoodie. “Alright, hold still.” Newt raises his eyebrows as she pulls out her phone, holding it up in front of him. “Okay, now make a normal face - not like that - wait, yeah, okay, I can work with that.”

He’s not sure what she’s referring to, as he changes his expression exactly zero times in the span of her rapidfire critiques, but he plays along, casting his eyes downward, trying to relax the rest of his face while she snaps photos of his hair from different angles. 

“Nice. Got it.”

He takes that as his cue to relax, back crunching into a C-shape like some kind of little gremlin with no regard for spinal health. It’s not very far off, honestly. He can’t be bothered. Sonya’s sudden flux of emotion had caught him completely off guard, concern sapping the energy out of him in a second.

She smiles then and it’s genuine, but there’s still a bit of that heaviness from before lingering in the air, settling uncomfortably into their skin like an itch, always there. He can tell that she wants to say something else, can practically see it dancing on the edge of her lips, but she holds back, letting out a long breath and settling for a simple reminder.

“I mean it. Anything.”

“I know.”

“I love you, Newt.”

“I know. I love you, too.”

 

Graduation is anti-climactic and bittersweet. The community centre that their school uses as a venue is hot and stuffy, and by the second hour of it all an awful sort of smell starts to hang in the air. Newt at least gets to sit near Minho, their last names close enough in the alphabet and graduating class of students small enough that he’s only a couple of seats away. They share a look when the valedictorian gets up to do their speech - this quiet girl that neither of them have ever spoken to, who frankly looks like she has no idea what she’s doing. 

(Everyone always assumed it would be Thomas or Teresa.)

It doesn’t feel like that monumental of an event to him, walking across the stage and receiving his diploma. He knows that it should: there was a while there - several separate whiles, actually - when he wasn’t sure if this day was going to come, for a wide variety of reasons. But it did, and that should mean something to him.

It doesn't. It just feels like another thing that’s happened to him. Maybe he’s gone through so many terrible things that he’s just numb to it all now, good or bad. It’s possible, but he discovers that that’s not entirely true later that night, when he realizes very suddenly and very bluntly that his life is going literally nowhere:

He’s not going to college. He works part-time at a library, and he has no actual skills that could warrant him earning another job. He’s not leaving their tiny, piece of shit small town and he’s not planning on leaving it any time in the foreseeable future, either. He has no prospects, and no potential.

Which is a super fun thing to realize on the day you’re done being obligated to attend the one structured activity that’s shaped your life for the past twelve years. 

 

It feels paralyzing, realizing this, but it doesn’t truly feel like something is actually ending until the next morning.

 

He wakes up early, chill from the open window invading his tiny sanctuary of warmth. The text comes a minute or two later, buzzing from underneath the dark green gown crumpled on the floor, untouched from where he shed it the day before. 

After a small collection of minutes, he ventures a leg out of the sheets and places it on the floor, arm following in a very awkward, gorilla-like fashion that only the half-unconscious can master. Once he’s fully returned to the safety of his bed, he presses the home button and lets the screen burn his retinas, eyes focusing a few seconds later on the most recent notification:

**iMessage: minho park (3)**

And then there’s that feeling in his stomach, the very one that came over him that fateful August morning that feels so long ago now, the one that he’d somehow finally been able to tune out for the past few months as things settled. It’s the one that tells him that this is probably not going to be good. The one that tells him his dad didn’t just disappear, or that Teresa and her family secretly blame him for everything that happened.

(He and Minho were on their way to being good again, so he doubts the feeling for one second, pretending that his intuition has ever been anything other than catastrophic.)

He unlocks his phone anyway, waiting to see something that will make his heart crumble, or stop, or fall out of his ass or whatever it likes to do these days.

His messages seem to somehow, impossibly, evoke all three.

 

**From: minho park**

hey man. i was going to tell you this in person yesterday

but i guess i really am a big baby after all. im leaving. like,

really leaving. i didn’t tell you because we weren’t talking

when it happened but i got a scholarship to go study in 

jersey. i’m leaving to go move there today. [5:46am]

i know you’re probably going to hate me. fuck, you should

hate me. losing him did something to me, and i just can’t

pretend to be okay with it anymore. i have to get out

of there. [5:47am]

i’m sorry. [5:47am]

 

Newt knows that there’s a bus every Friday morning that leaves from their town at 6:00am, heading north straight towards the city. He knows that if he left right now, he could probably make it to the bus station before Minho was gone.

He reads the texts over again and exhales for a long, long time.

Then, he gets out of bed, puts on a pair of shoes, and starts walking east, into the woods.

 

When he gets back to the house, it’s late in the morning. 

“You hear ‘bout Minho?” Sonya’s sitting on the counter when he comes in, sipping from a steaming mug. Newt must make a face then, something like  _ how in the bloody hell did  _ that  _ get through the town so quick,  _ because she hums and then says, “He texted me, too.”

_ Of course.  _ He doesn’t know why he thought he wouldn’t. They’d always been close, and after Newt hurt his leg, it was arguable that Sonya was closer with Minho than he was. “Yeah,” he says then, because he hadn’t actually answered his sister’s initial question. “I did.”

She nods and sets her mug down. “Out in the woods?”

“Yep.”

“You eat?”

“Nope.”

“Newt.”

“Sonya.”  
“ _Newt._ ”

“I don’t need you  _ monitoring  _ me.” The words come out a lot sharper than he intended and he tries to ignore the look of hurt that flashes over her face, just a split second before she recovers. She’s never really bugged him to eat in the morning, knowing that he genuinely doesn’t get an appetite until the evening. He sighs deeply.  _ It’s not her job. _

She huffs and unfolds herself from the counter, joints popping and cracking. She opens the cabinet, grabs a granola bar, and chucks it at Newt’s general torso area with much more force than necessary. “You need to fucking eat.”

So then - because Newt loves his sister and also because he is, admittedly, a little bit scared of the distinct lack of coddling that she usually employs when it comes to this - he channels his inner petulant child and crosses his arms, letting his eyes roll towards the ceiling with a breathy, punctuated, “Fine.”

And the obnoxious, triumphant smile on her face that comes next is almost enough to forgive the fact that she gave him the grossest flavour. 

 

An hour later, once he can almost ignore the feeling of food in his stomach, he realizes that there is another feeling bothering him altogether. He’s sitting at his desk where initially, he set out to do something, but now he’s forgotten it, just slouching there with a quickly fleeting sense of purpose. And it’s then, in the short space between being occupied and not, that it really, truly, fully hits him:

Minho is gone.

And he’s probably never coming back.

All of a sudden it’s all too overwhelming, emotion that he’d been missing for months flooding through him all at once like a tidal wave, knocking him off his feet and leaving him breathless. He isn’t aware that he’s crying until he sets his elbows on the surface of the desk and finds them sliding around, nearly slipping off the edge.

He knows that in that moment, he’s never felt so completely and utterly alone - not even the day his dad disappeared, or the day Teresa left. Because for both of those things, his best friend was there. Minho had never not been there, barring the past couple months. He was there when Newt’s mom died, and he was there when his dad tried to ship him and Sonya off to live with their aunt in the city - and he was there when she came  _ here _ , barely taking care of them before she, too, was gone. He was there when Newt realized he was gay, and when he had his massively dramatic crisis of figuring out his feelings for Thomas. He was there when Newt needed someone to text frantically the night that he and Thomas first kissed, and he was there when Thomas disappeared. He was there when Teresa and her family disappeared, and he was there when Newt needed him to come pick him up from the house, broken leg and all.

Minho was there, every single time.

And now, he’s not.

One by one, Newt has lost nearly every single person that’s ever been important to him. And the only one who he knows could comfort him, could take him and pull him out of this all-encompassing sadness before it turns into something messy, is not here.

With breaths gasping and shoulders shaking, the connection between brain and body is severed and his hands move on their own accord, reaching into the drawer and pulling out Thomas’ notebook, grabbing a pen and flipping to the back set of pages. 

If Thomas can’t talk to Newt, then maybe Newt can talk to him.

And maybe, he can pretend that makes it okay.

 

That night, he goes back to the seven eleven to pick up another pack of cigarettes and a box of bandaids. He’s gotten better at actually smoking them, finally making it to the end of his first pack after almost five months, but he still finds the taste abhorrent. 

The bandaids are for when he’s finished.

Sonya hasn’t said anything yet, about him smoking the cigarettes or what happens after. He thinks that she maybe just genuinely hasn’t noticed the almost scars on his fingers, round and easily fading. He’s not so sure she’s oblivious about the smoking itself, but then again, he doesn’t really ever smoke them all the way through, and it’s never more than once or twice a week, so perhaps he’s more evasive about it than he gives himself credit for.

When he walks into the store, it’s Alby at the counter again. He wasn’t expecting any different, but there’s still an odd, small sense of comfort that runs through him when he sees the familiar face. Though it doesn’t last for long, because a second later he notices that that familiar face has a black eye. 

_ Jesus, what happened to you?  _ The words are halfway off his tongue before he shoves them back in his mouth. The two of them have crafted a very careful balance of friendly/neutral retail acknowledgment over the years since his dad disappeared, and Newt isn’t about to jeopardize the guarantee of a painless interaction by asking him in no uncertain terms what in the hell had happened to his face.

Alby definitely notices him staring, and nods his usual nod anyway. Newt gives a curt, awkwardly tight lipped smile back and ducks into one of the aisles in search of his bandaids. He’d make the mistake of getting the thicker kind last time - they lasted longer and therefore Newt didn’t have to change them as often, saving money in the long run, but they were this obnoxiously orange sort of dark beige that surely couldn’t possibly match a single human person’s actual skin tone. He’d been sporting three of them - two on his ring finger and one on the pinky - when he’d waved at Minho in the hall last month, prompting his friend to frown, asking what had happened  _ this time.  _ Newt was able to bullshit an excuse on the spot, and Minho seemed to buy it at the time, but he didn’t want to have to risk it again. 

(Not that he had to worry about  _ him  _ saying anything anymore, but.)

Plus, with Summer around the corner, he’d have a lot less of an excuse to wear long sleeves, so he couldn’t pull them down over his hands. 

He ends up grabbing a box that looks a bit more promising; bandages with a lighter overall tone and semi-transparent parts that would probably blend in a little bit better with his skin. After that’s settled he spends a minute or two roaming up and down the other aisles, trying to recall if there’s anything he and Sonya had been needing that week.

When he gets up to the counter, just the box of bandaids and a miniature bottle of benadryl, he notices the sign on the counter encased in a little plastic placard:

_ HELP WANTED - LOOKING FOR CASHIERS _

And Newt almost has to laugh at that, because fuck, yeah.

“Something funny?” Alby still sounds a little bit like he has no reason to live, on brand as always, but there’s a hint of genuine curiosity behind it, accenting the minute upturn of his lips, almost imperceptible but still there.

Newt shakes his head. “Oh, no, I just. You’re the only cashier I’ve ever seen here, it’s kind of funny that you’re only just now hiring more.”

“You looking for a job?” Alby crosses his arms. Newt almost laughs again, but Alby just looks at him, waiting.

_ Oh, he’s not kidding.  _ Newt’s not really  _ looking  _ for a job, but he supposes that with school over now, he’ll probably be bored out of his mind pretty soon. And, well, money. 

“Yeah, sure.” 

“Alright. Cool.”

“Cool?”

“Yeah, when d’you wanna start?”

Newt blinks. Apparently, he just got a second job. “Are you - are you allowed to do that?”

“I can do whatever I want.”

He’s not sure if Alby’s bluffing, or if whatever injury caused his black eye is also messing with his cognitive abilities, but Newt cocks his head anyway, deciding on the spot because  _ why the fuck not.  _ “I mean, I’m free tomorrow.”

“Okay. Come in at four.”

“Okay.”

“You wanna buy those?”

“Oh, right. Yeah.”

 

And with that, he is officially a cashier-in-training. It’s definitely boring, tedious work, and after only a couple of shifts he fully understands why Alby looks dead in the eyes. Newt ends up getting mostly late shifts, which he can’t complain about given his messed up sleep schedule. Plus, it’s nice to not have to interact with that many customers. There are, of course, exceptions to the normal emptiness of the store, mostly weirdos and people that remind him way too much of himself - whether that venn diagram is two circles or one, he doesn’t care to consider.  But for the most part, he can kind of lose himself in the random tasks their manager leaves for them to do.

(Their manager - he exists, shockingly. Newt’s never seen him, but he signs his cheques, so he must be somewhere on this plane of existence.)

For the stretches of time where he’s not restocking shelves or sorting through inventory in the back, he gets to know Alby pretty well. 

He finds out that he did, in fact, go to the same high school as Newt, and is three years older. He coaches soccer at the community centre on the weekends, and he has about three energy drinks per shift - per seven eleven shift, not coaching shift.  _ That  _ would be something Newt would pay to see. He finds out that Alby’s mom died when he was younger, too, and that he has an older brother that lives in the city. He tells Newt that he likes people a lot more than his 2:00am self is willing to show, and that he’s saving up to go to teacher’s college.

In turn, Alby finds out that Newt has a younger sister and no parents, and that he really has no idea what he wants to do with his life but he likes books, and is halfway decent at throwing himself into a research project - not that that’s really an applicable life skill, but still. 

He doesn’t tell him about Thomas just yet, but he knows that Alby knows. The whole town knows, and he has that exact same look on his face as everyone else, the one that is half pity, half curiosity, full not the kinda shit Newt needs to be seeing on a daily basis. It makes him feel like a specimen, the private inner workings of his life somehow meant to be public domain just because something tragic happened to him. 

(It didn’t happen  _ to  _ him, just to the person he loved most. But because of that, it happens all over again  _ to  _ him - every single day, unrelenting.)

But, by the grace of whatever god is somehow still looking down on Newt with the slightest positive inclination, Alby keeps his mouth shut. 

He has a healthy amount of tact, that one. 

 

It doesn’t come up. This isn’t a problem-

Until it is. 

 

It’s the end of his second month working in the store and Summer is once more drawing to a close. He’s fresh off a long talk with Sonya, which is probably the reason why he doesn’t realize it’s happening until it’s over. They spent the afternoon between his morning library shift and his evening store shift curled up on either end of the couch together, sampling Sonya’s latest batch of homemade rose-infused tea, this time in a jug in the fridge, poured over ice with a thin slice of lemon in each of their mugs.

It was the second anniversary of Thomas’ disappearance the week prior, and both of them needed something that wasn’t angels and messages.

“Do you remember that time he completely wiped out on his bike, right in our driveway?”

(Newt remembers. He remembers the bike sliding out underneath Thomas after he turned his head too fast, distracted by Sonya’s wave from around the side of the house, and he remembers the nasty road burn that covered his shoulder for the remainder of that Summer. He remembers muttering, “oh my god, Tommy,” and trying to bite back a laugh as he went through the back doors and out to the greenhouse, returning with a clipping of aloe in hand. He remembers Thomas’ shirt sleeve being completely torn up and soaked in blood, and he remembers the following twenty minutes that he spent rifling through Newt’s drawers, one handed, searching for the ‘right’ sweater to borrow in replacement of his ruined t-shirt.

He never did get that sweater back, actually.)

They used that memory as a springboard to countless others, afternoon filled with giggling recounts and trailing stories, told with a healthy dose of content and melancholy, both dripping with that certain brand of nostalgia, not yet sad but definitely heading in that direction if you think about it for too long.

And so Newt was sent to work with this softer, lighter version of himself, both worn out and uplifted by the talk. 

Around four in the morning, just over an hour before he and Alby get to switch over with the morning crew, it happens.

Out of all the hours of the absolute ass of morning, between three and five was usually the stretch with the least customers. More often than not, Newt and Alby could get through an entire shift without seeing more than four or five people. But on the nights that, for whatever reason, there were more than normal, it was always the strangest people.

The guy seemed normal enough, which should have been the first indicator that something was about to go catastrophically wrong.

Newt is in the real liminal space hours, where nothing seems real and he thinks that maybe he could walk outside and it would be another universe, another life, the door some kind of interdimensional portal. Alby is on his third energy drink of the night - this time cherry flavoured - and it’s the home stretch, teal soon to be peaking over the horizon of inky black and navy blue. 

(That’s one of the few things Newt likes about working the graveyard shift, other than Alby. The store faces east, so he gets to walk into the rising sun on his way home. There is something rather triumphant about the whole thing, especially in the way his fingertips begin to thaw in the pale glow.)

He’s trying to convince himself to go over and restock the freezer aisle when the door chimes loudly, breaking him out of his thoughts, nearly jolting back into the case of cigarettes but regaining control of his muscles at the last possible moment, probably only looking a little weird to the new customer instead of like a full-blown freak.

These days, it’s the little victories.

The newcomer - just  _ waltzing _ into the lightweight arena that is seven eleven with bright eyes and scrawny legs as if it’s four in the afternoon and not in the morning - gives Newt a smile that is all too enthusiastic and lingers a moment before Newt nods back, wondering how in the hell this guy finds it in him to be so chipper.

He ducks into one of the aisles but Newt can still partially see him. He stands tall, head and shoulders slouching oddly over the top of the shelf. His skin is tanned, somewhere between Newt’s and Alby’s, and Newt feels a rush of jealousy run through him for one single second as he tries to remember the feeling of sunshine on his skin. 

(He’s glad Alby convinced him to opt for the half zip instead of the polo for his uniform, a choice where the latter would have seemed obvious to a younger, more naive Newt of two months ago.)

The guy spends a fair amount of time checking out the chips, but Newt also notices him glancing back to the cash every couple of seconds or so, eyes darting down as soon as they meet Newt’s. He wonders if he’d come in planning on stealing something - Newt can feel the years ticking off his life as he mulls over the possibility of that happening. He really doesn’t want to deal with that, so he spends the next couple of minutes keeping an eye on the dude, not caring if he’s subtle about it or not. The guy catches on shortly after, and if the hand moving up to run through his hair every few seconds is any indicator, he’s definitely more than a little bit nervous.

_ Good,  _ Newt thinks. 

If it really came down to it, he knows that he wouldn’t be able to take this guy in any sort of physical altercation. Newt’s tall, but this guy’s even taller, and a lot more filled out. Alby might stand a chance - he’s short but he’s compact, easily able to routinely lift double the inventory that Newt can. He glances over to see if Alby is paying any mind to the situation as it plays out but he’s just absentmindedly flipping over the chicken wings in the hot food section beside the cash area, seemingly oblivious.

But then, as if he senses Newt’s eyes on his, he looks over and  _ smiles _ , of all things, small and knowing like Newt’s supposed to understand what the hell  _ that  _ means. Maybe he is clued into what’s happening. Maybe he…  _ likes?  _ Confrontation? Newt knows Alby but he doesn’t know him  _ that  _ well. And, he never cared to share exactly how he’d gotten that black eye, back when he hired Newt. Suddenly, he’s not feeling all that great about the potential of any sort of escalation taking place.

“Hi, I think I’m good to go.” 

Newt blinks, hard, and looks up to find the guy standing at the counter in front of him, snacks and a drink cradled in his arms. Up close he looks less threatening and more… dopey?

“Of course, yeah, sorry.” He apologizes, not quite profusely but certainly getting there. How long has he been standing there, zoned out, making this dude wait to buy his shit?

“Oh, no, it’s okay,” he says, smiling again as he awkwardly releases his bundle of items onto the counter one by one. 

Newt starts scanning. “Want a bag?” he asks, not even bothering to look up.

“So, Isaac, what’s it like working the late shift and having all these weirdos like me coming in at four am?”

He looks up, blinking as the question takes a second to register in his mind. The guy is smiling, but his fingers are tapping on the counter, that nervous energy again. Newt swallows, suddenly thankful that store policy requires his legal name to be on his name tag.

In an hour, he’ll be on his doorstep, ready to collapse into bed for the morning. There’s no harm in humouring the guy.

“Oh, no, I’ve seen  _ much  _ weirder,” he finally answers, cracking a smile of his own. “One time - actually, no, more than one time, it took a while before we finally caught him - there was this guy that would come in and do, like, opium? In the washroom? We would always - he would leave poppyseeds all over the ground, which are apparently used to make opium tea, so. Yeah, no, you’re fine.”

The guy is leaning on the counter with both elbows, hands propped under his chin. Newt’s pretty sure that’s the only thing that’s keeping it from being on the floor. “No  _ way _ .”

“Yeah, it was - that’s probably the most bizarre thing, but I’m new, so I’m not giving out any awards just yet.”

“Wow, I feel really normal now. Maybe I should break out into song or something, just to give poppyseed guy a run for his money.”

Newt snorts a silent laugh at the mental image of it. “Oh, that’s six forty, by the way.”

“Right, thanks.”

There’s a little lull as the guy takes his card out to pay, and Newt feels like he needs to fill the silence. “Even seeing someone here at this hour is weird enough, so don’t go counting yourself out of the running or anything like that.”

He looks up and the smile that’s stretching across his face is as Newt just told him he picked the winning lotto ticket. “I won’t, thanks.”

Newt clears his throat and forces a tight smile as he slides the bag of snacks over to the guy. 

“I’ll see you around, then?”

“I mean, if you normally make your snack runs at four in the morning.”

The guys takes the bag and laughs - like really, fully  _ laughs,  _ as if what Newt just said was actually funny in any way whatsoever - and shrugs, stepping backwards toward the door. “I guess I will, then.”

_ Well, I’ll probably be here for the rest of my life, so.  _ “Yeah,” Newt responds awkwardly, and then with one final look the guy is out the door and starting down the street. 

_ Huh.  _ Well that was a slightly weird interaction, but nice all the same. He’s putting the receipt away and resolves to go finish the restock he’s been avoiding. He’s already forgetting about the guy but then Alby turns to him, leaning an elbow on the counter and posing faux seductively, eyebrows shot to the sky.

“Alright,  _ Isaac _ , you got  _ game _ .”

“I -  _ what _ ?”

Alby lowers his chin and gives Newt a pointed  _ look _ , pushing off the counter and crossing his arms. 

“I underestimated you, kid.”

He resists the urge to roll his eyes at Alby calling him  _ kid,  _ and starts to feel his shoulders caving in protectively as his body clues in as to what’s going on here. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Alby scoffs. “Oh, don’t give me that. You know  _ exactly  _ what I’m talking about. And I gotta say, flirting with a customer? That’s pretty ballsy.”

“Flirting with a - I beg your bloody pardon?” The oxygen picks that moment to exit the building, leaving Newt ready to collapse in on himself as the guilt rushes in from all sides, crushing his lungs.

“Oh, come on - you two were totally hitting it off! Not to mention you  _ watching  _ him from the second he came in.”

“I wasn’t - that - I thought he was trying to  _ steal  _ something, Alby.”

Alby actually has the gall to  _ laugh,  _ Newt halfway between fuming and mortified as he waits for him to finish. “Man, do you have this bad a read on everyone you meet?”

“It’s not - it’s not funny.” The ability of speech is slowly slipping from his grasp, vocal cords tightening and straining as he feels the burn begin behind his eyes. Alby’s voice is barely there.

“What did you think of  _ me  _ when we first met? Newt, come on, I’m serious - if you didn’t see that that guy was-”

Finally, he finds his voice once more. “I wasn’t - I didn’t know that that was what was - that that was what he was trying to accomplish. I wouldn’t have been - been nice to him, if I did.” The words are strained, squeezing their way out of his throat with great effort. He turns away from Alby, wiping roughly at the single tear that’s found its way onto his cheek.

There’s a heavy, hanging beat, and then Alby backtracks. “Woah, listen, it’s okay, man. I’m sorry if I-”

“It’s not,” Newt says, “it’s not okay.” 

And it’s really not, because is this who he is now? Who he’s become? Someone who flirts shamelessly with random dudes -  _ at work  _ \- while his boyfriend, his best friend, the love of his life is god knows where? Someone that’s become apathetic, complacent, barely even  _ trying  _ to get back to Thomas and settling into the comfort of his dead end job where he works the bloody graveyard shift?

It is just about the farthest thing from okay that Newt can imagine. 

“Really, Newt, it’s alright. I’m not gonna, like,  _ tell on you _ , and also from a personal standpoint I really couldn’t care less if-”

“I have a boyfriend,” he says, the only words running through his brain that are available for him to grab and throw out, the only words he can hear, beating through his guilty, guilty heart at a pathetic stutter.

“Oh,” Alby says, and then, “ _ oh _ .”

And no one needs to say anything else, because they both know. 

The rest of the shift is spent in relative silence, Newt digging his fingernails into his palms and willing himself to focus on just the pain, and nothing else. His fingers twitch every time his eyes pass over the container of lighters.

He knows that Alby isn’t going to be weird about it - hell, he’s already stopped being weird about it in the span of ten minutes. That’s not going to be a problem. What’s going to be a problem is if that guy makes it a habit to come back, expecting Newt to be all bright and shiny about it.

He supposes he’ll figure that out if it ever comes to it.

 

He hadn’t ever stopped to think that Thomas’ disappearance was just an event for some people - for most people - and not this living nightmare that’s been Newt’s reality for the past two years, dragging him along day and night until the most terrifying things he could imagine became commonplace, because they  _ happened _ , and now he has to figure out what comes next.

 

(Two years, two weeks, one day, four hours, and twenty eight minutes.)

 

After the incident with the guy - whose name he never got, and has resolved to never get, who will be henceforth known as The Guy - Newt buckles down and rededicates himself to the case. Because really, what’s stopping him? Teresa isn’t there so he can’t feel guilty. Minho isn’t there so he can’t be yelled at. And he knows that Sonya is going to support him, within reason - but that’s the thing, because all of this  _ is  _ within reason. He’s not asking anyone for anything preposterous, here.

Once Sonya’s back at school (grade eleven, good  _ god _ ) he spends pretty much every minute he’s not at the library or the store throwing himself back into the research, going over and over everything he’s amassed just to double, triple, quadruple check that he hasn’t missed anything. 

He’s driving back from the city after following an inkling of a lead (dead end) when he passes by the Murphy house. He has to do a double take before he realizes that, yes, over a full year later, the  _ for sale  _ sign is still standing tall at the end of the driveway. He has to pull over to the side of the road, confusion taking control and turning off the car before he blinks and realizes:

_ Oh. Of course. _

He doesn’t know how to name the feeling that rushes through him then, but the acid churning in his stomach tells him enough. He sometimes forgets how much money Thomas and Teresa’s family has - you wouldn’t know it if you never stepped foot in their house; not a single person in that family is even remotely entitled, or greedy, or any other adjective you could usually use to describe someone who’s grown up with a doctor for a mother and an architect for a father - but then there’s just small, monumental things like this that send that reality crashing back down on top of Newt.

They didn’t even really  _ need  _ to sell their house, they just left without giving it a second thought. 

He tries, sometimes, to hate Thomas. He tries to find a reason -  _ any  _ reason - to make this whole thing hurt just a little bit less, but it’s always fleeting. Still, he tries: he sits in his car and he imagines Thomas blinking over at him and saying something like, “What? It just never sold,” as if there’s nothing wrong with that, as if he can’t possibly fathom a reason why Newt might be upset about it. 

Again, it doesn’t last. 

It just makes him feel worse; it makes him feel stupid for thinking that he could ever hate Thomas, for anything, despite the stark differences in their financial situations - and it makes him feel sick for even trying, for distorting his memories of Thomas so easily. 

He turns on the car again and puts it into drive, ready to leave out of pure guilt, but then something catches in the corner of his eye and his head is pulled back to the left, toward the house, until-

The garden. It’s not overgrown or dying like Newt had assumed - like he’d  _ expected _ , seeing as no one’s been tending to it for the past year - but that couldn’t be farther from the reality of it: the shrubs are trimmed down and the soil beneath looks freshly watered, despite it being completely sunny for the past week and a half. The smaller plants look healthy, too, leaves green and thriving.

And of course, the gardenias are centre stage, bright white and fully in bloom. 

It would melt his heart if he wasn’t so bloody confused. He thinks, maybe - no, that’s not possible. He knows it’s not. But he’s up and out of the car within the next second, because yes, he has to check. He’s across the lawn in no time, the chime of the security camera barely registering in his ears before his face is pressed up against the glass once more, blinking into the - yes, the still empty house. 

He’s not sure what he expected, but. 

How the fuck does the garden still look like they never left?

He thinks, for one second, that maybe - no, that’s probably the stupidest idea yet. Talking through a radio is one thing, but cosmic shearing scissors is another thing entirely. 

He blinks, hopping one-legged down the steps of the porch to check again if this is really happening to him right now - and then he sits on the lowest step, pulling out his phone.

 

**To: sister**

has teresa said anything to you about being back in town? [2:10pm]

 

It’s probably for the best that he doesn’t even have a full minute to consider how he’d feel if Teresa or her parents had been back in town without telling him, for however long. Sonya’s reply comes in almost immediately.

 

**From: sister**

oh yeah [2:11pm]

no [2:11pm]

im assuming you drove by and saw the garden [2:11pm]

 

**To: sister**

yea??????????????????? [2:11pm]

 

**From: sister**

no that was me [2:12pm]

 

**To: sister**

????? [2:12pm]

 

**From: sister**

ugh im in class but ill explain when i get home okay

 

He sends off a quick  _ okay  _ before pocketing his phone once more. He figures he should head home before anyone sees him lurking around and gets suspicious. But before he does, he turns around and snaps a quick photo of the garden in all its healthy glory. Once he gets the full story from Sonya, he’ll send it to Teresa so that she can show her dad.

He figures they could all use some comfort, no matter how small.

(The full story: this Summer she was bored out of her mind and hated seeing something Mr. Murphy used to love so much just fall into disrepair, so she’s been piling all her tools into the basket of her bike every other week and tending to it - even transplanting some of her annuals -  just so that there was one thing in their lives that didn’t have to fall apart.)

  
  


Everything keeps going. Summer turns to Fall Turns to Winter turns to Spring, and despite the whirlwind of time whipping past him at breakneck speed, Newt feels paralyzed, frozen as he stutters from moment to moment. He exists only in bursts, mind out in the void with the warped memory of Thomas, straining a little more under the weight of each new day that passes. At one point he stops being a real person but a concept, something that Newt grips so tightly, so desperately, that it can’t help but begin to slip away.

His memories become slippery, shifting and sliding this way and that until he can’t remember the truths which he used to recall with certainty. Timelines get messier, and the order of things flip around without any apparent regard for Newt’s sanity. Did Thomas still have his green sweater? Did he even borrow that one that Summer, or was it the black one his dad gave him? Was that night in his basement with Teresa and Minho before or after the time he and Thomas almost got caught down there when they thought no one else was home? Was it Thomas’ mom or his dad that flicked the lights on, calling down the stairs to see if they were there?

Was the little fleck of gold that stood out from the brown of his eyes on the left side or the right? What was the exact pattern he always traced out on Newt’s palm with his thumb? He swung one arm just a little higher whenever he walked - was it the left, or the right? How did his voice sound when he said Newt’s name? How did he place his arms when they hugged? What was that tune he was always whistling? 

How did it start, that wonderful thing his face did, the first time Newt told him he loved him?

The last time Newt told him he loved him? 

All the times in between?

 

The end of the book - his book,  _ their  _ book - welcomes a hurried hand and an influx of new notes:

 

_ Tommy, _

_ I know that you’re out there, somewhere. I’m trying to get to you, I promise. I won’t ever stop trying.  _

 

_ Tommy, _

_ I’m trying to remember, to see if there was anything - any way I could have stopped this from happening, but there’s nothing. Why is there nothing? _

 

_ Tommy, _

_ I wish I could hear your voice, just one more time.  _

 

_ Tommy, _

_ I’m think I’m starting to forget. _

 

_ Tommy, _

_ I love you. I will always love you. _

  
  


He waits. 

Life rushes past. He wakes up one morning in early March to find the end of a golden braid in the sink, a few rogue strands wisping out onto the counter. He knows, before he even sees her, bob cropped level to her chin, that his hair is now the primary braiding medium of the household.

(He doesn’t mind. He can pull it back into a proper bun, now, and if Sonya wants to embellish that, she can do so in whatever extravagant fashion she wants.)

He waits.

He has another dream; there’s the same kind of thick, tangible realness that at first he thinks he’s just forgotten where he was again. In this one, he is standing in the clearing and it’s empty again. There is a hockey stick clutched in his hands (which is his first clue that this is not real, because he hasn’t been on the ice since he was eight years old) and a rotten, acidic smell rises up off the ground, the ground that is coated in thick white dirt, sinking into the Earth as the weeds and the moss grow over it at fast-forward speeds.

(He doesn’t know what it means, and this time he doesn’t try to decode it, tired down to the very core of his being.)

He waits.

His body starts to do a weird thing as the snow begins to melt, smell of dirt awakening once more from under the muddy slush. It starts in his calves, then jumps to his fingertips, crawling up his forearms as it tingles in his neck, pulsing thickly. And then, he falls to the ground, limbs piling unceremoniously wherever he happens to be. By the fourth time he starts to get pretty fed up with it all, making a point to stomach another piece of toast in the mornings (mornings, afternoons, evenings - whenever he wakes up) just so that Sonya can’t blame it on a lack of food.

(She only finds him once, on the living floor when she gets home from school. He thanks the stars - Polaris in particular, though he still can’t find it, he knows it’s there, watching, waiting - that it never happens at either of his workplaces. But if he’s being completely and totally honest with himself, he knows that it won’t. 

Every other time is in the woods, where he somehow always wakes up beside the statue. From the ground, the scales almost look like they’ve moved.)

He waits.

Mary jokes about putting a limit on the amount of books he’s allowed to have off the shelves during a single shift. 

He waits.

Alby tells him that his black eye, last Summer, was actually from a workplace incident involving a very zealous eight year old with a damn good kick. He laughs along with him like he’s supposed to, but it’s empty. 

He waits. 

He waits.

And he waits-

Until.

Until he gets the last message.

 

It’s April and he’s lying in bed, paying no mind to the sunshine outside. 

It doesn’t happen like the others, clear and obvious.

It feels like a fight. 

The first thing to go is his phone, mail disappearing from his screen as it goes dark, no flickering. He thinks that maybe the just timed out the auto-off, but then the overhead light flicks on and he knows.

He abandons the phone but keeps it face up, in case it’s another call. The radio starts to ring lowly, an even tone with volume dipping and rising in time with the pulsing of the light. Something about it all seems incredibly strained, like there is something actively fighting against it this time, something that doesn’t want any of this to be happening. 

There’s a long couple of seconds where it all falters, room falling back into relative dimness, but then it surges again, brighter and louder than before, and Newt gasps as the sound of Thomas’ voice:

It is not through the radio, or his phone, or the computer.

The words breathe from all around him, presence thick and internal as if the voice is already in his mind.

“Don’t trust them.”

And then, it is gone. 

His first thought is that he hallucinated it, truly off the deep end now. But no, he knows that that’s not true. He was  _ here.  _ Newt felt it, and he knows by now what the absence feels like enough to know when there isn’t one.

His second thought is that he’s not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad one. Didn’t Teresa say something about Thomas hearing them all on his own? And if that was later on, when he started to get bad, then-

A blonde head appears in the doorway.

“Was that another message?”

“Huh?”

“The power went out.”

“Oh. Yeah.” 

She enters the room and sits down at the end of his bed, cross legged. “Well, anything we can work with?”

“Don’t trust them?” He’s not sure if that’s entirely workable, but the wheels start turning anyway. He gets up off the bed, pacing, and Sonya mirrors. “Don’t trust them,” he mutters to himself. The more he says it, the less he likes it.

How is he supposed to know what that means? Can he even assume that it’s Thomas, still? How does he know who’s controlling what - and if he can’t trust  _ them _ , working momentarily off the assumption that  _ them  _ is everyone that’s not Thomas - because it was his voice, that’s the one thing Newt is absolutely certain of - then what does that mean when it comes to his own mom? What does Thomas know about-

“Wait, what about mom?” Sonya’s voice is so small that Newt barely even hears it, the words absorbing a full few seconds after they’ve left her mouth. 

He stops, turning to face her: eyebrows drawn together, mouth fallen just slightly open, trembling, and tears threatening to spill over - apparently, he said all that out loud.

He takes a step forward.

She takes a step back. 

“Newt, no. What did you just say about mom?”

And there it is - the last shred of innocence draining right out of her, sapped by Newt’s carelessness. 

“Sonya,” he tries, but it is a losing battle.

“No, I’ve done enough looking the other way. I need you to tell me, right now. Everything, no more hiding.”

In that moment she reminds him so much of himself, the version he so badly wanted to be this time two years ago. So as she stands there, arms held taut at her sides as she waits, frown unwavering, he thinks of what it was he needed.

“Alright.”

He feels himself collapse a little as he exhales the word, like one miniscule portion of the weight on his shoulders has been lifted. And so he tells her, right then. Everything - what Mary told him, how their mom used to be obsessed with the angels, saying they were watching over her; about Thomas’ drawings and the way he used to say her name in his sleep; what Teresa later confirmed about how Thomas communicated with - with  _ them. _

“So - so what does all of that… What does it  _ mean _ ?”

“I don’t know what it means.” It feels like a cop out, but it’s true. He still has no idea, months later. He hasn’t been able to piece together any of it. No more clues, no missing pieces. Just a bunch of pins in the wall and nothing to connect them with.

Actually, speaking of. 

“I don’t know, Sonya, but do you want to help me try and work it out?”

 

Once she’s had her go at the existential crisis of the century, they spend the rest of the night carving out a section on Newt’s wall for the  _ mum  _ branch of the mystery board.

“How long have you had all this?” she asks him, eyes darting over his desk, taking in all the scraps of information he’s pulled together, finally free of their hiding place in his drawer.

“Not very long.” It’s one of those half-truths, the kind you can pull either way depending on how you look at it. A year isn’t  _ that  _ long, is it?

(It is, but he doesn’t want to make her feel any worse than she already does.)

“Okay,” she says, wiping one last stray tear from her cheek, and carefully picking up the photo of their mom as she takes a deep breath, “let’s do this.”

And with yet another pin in the wall, they begin.

 

They find out that night that the power surge, though seemingly small, actually managed to burn every single bulb in the house. When he goes to the hardware store to pick up the twenty three (23) replacements, he is met with a surprise.

“Oh, well would you look who it is!”

He arrives at the cash to find his worst nightmare.

“Isaac, how are you?” The Guy - _ The Guy -  _ is smiling over at him, red apron sitting square over his torso, indicating that, yes, Newt is not getting out of here with his lightbulbs without talking to him. 

He does not read the name tag. 

“Oh, hi - yeah, uh, I’m good,” he says curtly, giving the appropriate amount of -  _ oh, hey, I recognize you!  _ \- time before he speaks, as if he didn’t recognize him immediately. He chooses not to elaborate and sets his basket on the counter, nearly overflowing with neatly boxed light bulbs.

The Guy chortles. Yes,  _ chortles.  _ “You don’t get a lot of natural light over at your place or something?” And Newt really just isn’t in the mood, two seconds away from firing off something like  _ I have a boyfriend  _ until The Guy speaks again, cutting him off cold. 

“Y’know, there was this guy - couple years back, now, and - it’s the funniest thing. He’d come in here, like, I swear it was at least once a month, and he’d always have this big basket of light bulbs, just like this.”

Well, shit.

“Oh?”

And that one syllable is apparently all the prompting The Guy needs to launch off again. “Yeah, it was really weird. Kind of fidgety, anxious type. Really nice guy, though. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him in a  _ while.  _ I wonder whatever happened to him.”

“Hmm, yeah,” he responds. It’s all he can trust himself to say without bursting out into hysterical laughter, or tears, or both. 

 

The bulbs end up having a slightly different temperature than the previous ones, giving the house a feeling that’s just a little too unsettling for Newt’s taste. It reminds him of back when Teresa was still in her photography phase, when she’d made him, Minho, and Thomas stay with her after hours at school so she could make use of the freaky lighting in the gym. The pictures had actually turned out really cool, and for a while there Minho was real keen on the idea of starting a band and using the pictures as the cover for their first album.

This, in turn, leads to Newt searching for the pictures on his camera roll (he  _ knew  _ he saved them somewhere, damnit). After a while he gives up, more sad than when he started with the distant memories of when they were all still here now fresh in his mind. 

There are now things he’s almost entirely forgotten, like that time in grade ten english - the sole class they had with the four of them together - that they decided it would be fun to cross dress (read: Teresa dressed the three of them in her most padded bras, plus scarves in lieu of hair, and she put her ponytail up in a beanie) for their group’s performance of a scene from  _ Hamlet.  _ Or, that stretch of two entire days where he and Thomas would only text each other the word  _ Ok,  _ neither of them wanting to break the ridiculous chain they accidentally started. 

(It was Thomas who ended up losing, hitting send on an  _ Oj  _ before he could correct himself.)

_ This  _ leads to that heavy, pure sadness finding a home in Newt’s chest again, immobilizing him as he lies there on his side, arm going numb as he props his phone up by his face.

And because he’s never been good at self care, he decides to make it worse by pulling open his computer.

He hasn’t looked at the copy of Thomas’ desktop in a while, having already pulled off everything relevant to the angels. But today, he doesn’t want to think about that. He scrolls through the pages upon pages of folders, eyes glazing over familiar titles such as  _ john the baptist  _ and  _ 2013 - messages _ . Towards the end of the collection, he stops and hovers over one he hasn’t yet delved into:  _ t’s photos. _

He knows it’s just going to be more of the same hurt, heart aching for happier times as he relives the memories through a higher quality resolution. But he really does want to revisit that album cover for the band that never was ( _ The Apologies,  _ half-decent name courtesy of Thomas) so he goes against his better judgement and double clicks, watching the screen fill with more folders. 

And in true Thomas fashion, they’re only vaguely properly named, leaving Newt guessing what he’ll find before he opens each folder, always surprised at how far off his guesses end up being. He clicks on one called  _ betrayal  _ and laughs as soon as he sees the pictures, name making sense right away.

It’s from the day they went hiking, two - nearly three, now - Summers prior. The first couple rows of pictures are from the lake, mostly candids but a few posed ones, impressively not as awkward looking as Newt remembers feeling while taking them. There’s a few taken in the car, presumably on the way home, with Minho looking wistfully out the window like the elegant bastard he is. After that is all pictures from the rest of the night in Thomas and Teresa’s basement, the aforementioned betrayal right there in the middle of it. 

Newt’s about to open the image in full size when he notices, down at the bottom of the screen, another file, one that’s named differently than the rest of them, all just sorted in random numbers according to the order they were taken.

This one is called  _ the love of my life _ , and from the thumbnail Newt already knows exactly what photo it is. 

He also knows that, right now, he is not going to be able to open it without starting to cry, and he knows that if he starts to cry, he will not stop for a very long time.

So, he goes back to the betrayal in all its legendary glory, opening it in full. 

It still makes him smile just as much as the first time he saw it, as much as every time he sees it up on the wall, despite being the centre of the tangled conspiracy that has consumed his life. Thomas really does look ridiculous, Teresa capturing the exact moment where he was made aware of the camera, eyes dancing oh so delicately on the edge of ignorance and disbelief. 

The photo itself is incredibly high quality, much higher quality than the version that Newt has on his wall. He supposes it makes sense, his version being the bungled, compressed one that facebook messenger required in order to actually send. The version he’s looking at now is probably the most unaltered version of the file, so big that he can actually see the pattern of discolouration in one of Thomas’ freckles. It makes sense - Teresa’s camera was top quality, and while she would never flaunt that sort of thing on purpose, it was still probably the most expensive camera Newt’s ever held. 

He scrolls a few times, zooming in on Thomas’ face. Hell, he can almost-

Huh.

He swings his legs of the edge of the bed, standing up just quick enough for the dizziness to hit him head on. He ignores it and stumbles over to the Thomas Disappearance Conspiracy Wall, nose almost touching one of the pins as he inspects. 

There’s definitely something reflected on his glasses, from the glare of the computer screen.

He goes back to the bed, the unmistakable feeling of  _ something  _ coursing through him as he pulls the computer onto his lap. 

He scrolls his fingers on the trackpad, zooming in towards the top half of Thomas’ face. 

The bottom ridge of his glasses are just visible over his cheeks when the photo viewer application freezes,  _ (Not responding)  _ flashing at the top of his screen.

Then there’s a knock on the door.

“Come in,” he says automatically, frustration leaking through his voice. When he looks up, Sonya is already in the room.

“Y’know, something’s just not adding up with all of this,” she says, not even looking at him as she strides up to the wall and crosses her arms.

_ More like  _ nothing’s  _ adding up with all of this.  _ “Yeah, you’re telling me.”

She rolls her eyes and scoffs. “No, I mean, like. We’re working under the assumption that Thomas and mum are like, the same kinda deal, right?”

It takes him a second to get his brain working on the same level as hers, one metaphorical foot still stuck in the world of megapixels, reflections on glasses, and unreliable default programs, and then he snaps back, shutting his laptop and giving her his full attention. “Right.”

“Okay, so that’s why I’m - the second message:  _ I don’t think I can save her. I’m sorry.  _ Yeah? We’re pretty solid on the idea that the  _ her  _ is mum, and we have Teresa to corroborate that. But if mum died, then why would Thomas think he needed to save her in the first place?”

Newt blinks, and then sits up. That had never crossed his mind. “So are you thinking that it  _ isn’t  _ mum that he was talking about in the message?”

“I don’t know. That’s the thing, I just. I don’t know.” She lets out a frustrated sigh, arms swinging down at her sides.

Newt tilts his head. “I mean, you have a point.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, it definitely doesn’t make much sense if you think about it for, like, five seconds.”

She rolls her eyes again and laughs, shaking her head. “None of this makes sense, whether you think about it or not.” She takes a couple steps back from the wall, suddenly flipping her head over like she’s about to do a somersault, hands coming up to where her hair hangs down and-

“Oh my god, I forget that it’s gone.” Her fingers flutter at her chin once she’s back to an upright position, half-hysterical smile taking over the bottom half of her face. “Anyway, I can’t, so put your hair in a bun. I have an idea.”

 

Sonya’s idea takes them back to the library, from whence Newt had just returned only twenty minutes prior to her bursting into his room. Mary does a double take when they walk in the doors, but smiles nonetheless.

“Forget one of your books?”

It’s Sonya that answers, light and bouncy as always. “Hi Mary! Actually, no, we’re here to use the microfiche.”

She quirks an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Yeah, just some family research.” Mary’s eyes dart over to Newt at this, worry glinting through the dark brown for just a second before Sonya starts up again. “I’m assuming you don’t still have hard copies of the town paper from twelve or so years ago?”

“That we don’t,” she answers, “I believe Newt should be able to show you the way?”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Newt says, still a little shaken from Mary’s weird look. 

But any indication of that is gone now, same soft smile on her face as she’s given him for the past five years. “If you guys need any help, just let me know.”

“Of course.”

 

Newt learns that, somehow, his sister knows how to use a microfiche machine, but he doesn’t learn much else. 

“Are you sure it was August?” He’s maneuvering the slide on the platform with little grace, the magnified version of the tiny pages moving too fast on the screen and blurring the words. He groans internally while he waits for the image to load again and when it does, a considerable amount of time later, it’s between two separate pages.

He might just have to smash this machine to bits.

“I mean, I was five. Dad always said it was at the end of the Summer, though. And I remember it was before I went to school, because that was my first year going to kindergarten in America.”

“What?” He’s already forgotten what the question was, too engrossed in the obsolete technology induced rage.

Sonya pulls her magnifying glass down from her face, slide dropping down onto the pile on the floor in front of her. “I’m pretty sure it was August. Did you check the end of July, too? They’re in that pile there.” She points to the small tower of slides on the table at his right elbow, just waiting to be knocked over.

“Not yet, no. I’ll do those next.”

The thing is this: they’re not entirely sure that their mom’s obituary actually exists.  

They check all of August, and then all of June, and all of September, for the year she died, but there is nothing.

“It was ‘05, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe - maybe it’s not August? We were little, so we could be remembering it wrong.”

“Maybe, yeah.”

Sonya chews on her lip and gathers the mess of slides into a neat pile. “Oh, duh,” she says then, head snapping up toward Newt. “Let’s just ask Mary. You said she knew her, yeah?”

“Oh, yeah.” Why didn’t he think of that? Could’ve been helpful forty-five minutes ago, before they resolved themselves to using the world’s most archaic e-reader (It’s really not that awful of a machine and Newt knows that, he’s just bitter that he’s not immediately good at using it).

They abandon the microfiche and march themselves quite ceremoniously over to the circulation desk. 

There is a feeling, deep in the pit of his stomach.

“You guys find what you were looking for?”

Sonya looks over at Newt, and he clears his throat. “Actually, no. We were wondering if maybe you’d be able to answer a few questions for us.”

Mary raises her eyebrows. “Oh?”

He takes a breath. “It’s about our mom,” he says, anticipating the sudden, miniscule drop in her smile, “we couldn’t find an obituary for her in the newspaper archives. Do you remember the exact date that she died?”

Her eyelids flutter for a couple seconds, head rearing back just slightly. There’s an awful moment where Newt thinks that maybe he’s hit a sore spot - well of course he has, they were  _ friends _ , why would she be chill with being reminded of her death - but then:

“I’m sorry, what?”

He - hm. “We, uhm, we know it was sometime in August of 2005, but our dad never kept any records of it or anything like that - that we could find, anyway - and there wasn’t an obituary for an Elizabeth or a Beth or a Lizzy, or actually  _ anyone  _ with the last name Ross - or Bland, that was her maiden name - anywhere near that time frame.”

“And you knew her, so,” Sonya pipes in, cheer fading as the wheels in both their heads begin to turn.

Mary is silent for a long, long moment, eyes flitting back and forth between Newt and Sonya’s faces. Then, she sighs and buries her head in her hands. 

“Did he,” she starts, lifting her face up once more, “did your father tell you that she died?”

And in that freeze frame of a second, there’s nothing they can do but stand there and numbly nod. 

For the first time in Newt’s life, Mary swears. “Jesus fucking christ,” she says, “I always hated that man.” A short burst of hysterical laughter escapes her lips, making the situation that much more absurd, swirling mix of equal parts ridiculous, abhorrent, and earth-shattering. 

Neither Newt nor Sonya can speak, or move, or process. 

“Come here,” Mary says, gesturing for them to move behind the counter. Evidently he  _ can  _ move, because a second later Newt blinks and finds himself sitting beside Sonya, behind the desk with Mary.

It’s Sonya that breaks out of the stupor first. “I’m sorry, what?” It’s not her about-to-cry voice, like Newt might have expected, but something new, a tone he’s never heard before. He looks over to see her eyes wide, lips pressed tightly together as if she’s about to burst out laughing.

“Yeah, what?” Newt echoes, but his own vocal chords are not as kind; the words wrap around a voice crack, pitch doing whatever it pleases.

Mary presses her lips together, exhaling loudly through her nose like she’s dealing with a difficult customer and not taking apart everything Newt’s ever known, piece by piece.

“She came by one day, and told me she was leaving. She looked… scared. I thought she meant that she was - I thought she was leaving with the two of you, leaving your father.”

Sonya is hitting Newt’s knee. He looks at her like,  _ I know. _

“And there wasn’t - no search parties, no missing persons reports, no - nothing?” The words surprise him, jumping out of his mouth without permission.

“That’s what - initially, your father thought that that’s what happened. But before any of that could be processed, the police brought me in for questioning - because she came here so often, because we were friends - and I told them what she told me. They threw out the missing persons file before it was even started.”

Sonya gasps, quietly. “That would explain why there was nothing in the papers.”

“Wait, but then… How come no one’s ever corrected us? Does everyone - were they just playing along?”

“Newt, you have to understand that when your parents moved here, they really didn’t know anyone. If your father told you that she died, that’s likely what you told your friends and teachers.”

_ Shit.  _ “Why would he tell us that? Why wouldn’t he just tell us the truth?”

Mary looks so, so sad. “I don’t know. I really don’t - it’s possible that he didn’t want the two of you to think she was abandoning you? Which is - I am so, so sorry. I think about that day all the time, trying to figure out why someone as compassionate and loving as your mother would just leave like that, but. I just don’t know.”

Newt and Sonya share a look. 

“But,” she continues, “she’s - she’s out there, somewhere. I was never able to find her - and god, did I try - but maybe you will.”

 And he forgets, just for a second, that Mary’s entire life hasn’t been enveloped by the angels. He knows exactly where his mother is.

Well, not exactly. But.

“Thank you,” Sonya says, “I think we need to go home and process all of this, it’s very - wow.”

“Oh, of course, honey. I’m so - if there’s anything,  _ anything  _ I can do for the two of you, please. Newt, you have my number.  _ Anything. _ ” She is utterly apologetic, and Newt almost feels bad. 

“Thank you, Mary.”

The second they’re outside, Sonya spins in a circle to face Newt. “Dude.”

“I know.”

“ _ Dude _ .”

“Sonya, I know.”

“I’m sorry, am I-” she hugs herself, energy deflating from her shoulders just a bit. “Am I being too much? I really don’t have any memories of her at all, so I think I would be a lot more sad if I did, if I’m being annoying just let me know.”

He takes a second to consider. Is he even sad? Should he be? If he’s being honest, he doesn’t remember that much of their mother either. And she’s not  _ dead  _ dead, which is great, but.

“No, it’s fine.”

“Okay. This is just -  _ dad _ , holy shit, right?”

“God, I know.”

“Whack.”

Newt knows that this is so much more than his brain can process at the moment, and that eventually it’ll sink in, and he’ll probably be sad then. But, for now:

“Yeah,  _ whack. _ ”

  
  


When it does sink in, he is confronted with several things.

The first thing is the thought that he might’ve been able to do something, when it was their mom. 

He knows, deep down, that this isn’t true - that he was seven years old, that he thought she was dead, that he didn’t know anything about the angels - but he thinks it anyway, guilt always stronger than voice of reason. 

The second thing is the question of Thomas and his mother: how come  _ they’re  _ linked? Would it not make more sense for Newt and his own mother to be connected in this freaky interdimensional sort of way? He thinks, briefly, that maybe there’s some sort of convoluted backstory in which some Hollywood movie-esque switch had been made when they were infants, and that it was really Thomas and his mom that were mother and son, but then he remembers his mom wasn’t even on the same continent as Thomas when he was born, so that crack theory is a bust.

(Also, Newt looks much too alike to his mother to not be directly related.)

The third thing, the one he is most consumed by, is how this all comes back to Thomas, in terms of his own prospects. 

Newt knows this - he knows that both his mother and Thomas disappeared under the same circumstances, and that the both of them could talk to the angels. He knows that the both of them could communicate through limited means. Their stories are basically the same, except for the fact that Thomas says that Newt’s mom cannot be saved.

He doesn’t want to think about it. 

 

He thinks, instead, back to when he was seven, using every brain cell he has to try and conjure the exact events of that Summer.

He remembers being woken up early - early like  _ six,  _ like early for even young Newt, long before he became a chronic afternoon riser - by his father. He remembers being confused as he watched him take Newt’s school bag, the new one that he hadn’t even gotten a chance to use yet, and stuffing clothes inside of it, plucked randomly from both his floor and the drawers of his dresser. 

He remembers Sonya getting a mark on her face from falling asleep against the seatbelt, and he remembers it not fading until after they got back home from their aunt’s house, four days later. 

He remembers coming back and sitting down on the couch with her, their dad crouching down in front of them and saying that mommy had died.

He remembers Sonya asking what that meant, and he remembers being proud that he knew the answer: “It means that she’s gone away, and that she’s not coming back, but she’s in a better place.” 

(When Winston’s dog died the year prior, back home, their first grade teacher had used those same words to comfort twenty sobbing six year olds.)

He remembers his dad nodding sternly, quivering lip the only thing out of place as he said, “Yes, that’s what it means. She’s not coming back.”

He remembers, after that, nothing. 

 

He met Thomas, Teresa, and Minho the month after that, shiny new backpack with a stray sock still at the bottom of it held proud on his shoulders as he walked into their second grade class.

Not even two minutes into recess, a boy came up to him and said, “You talk funny.”

He was about to counter back with a slick, “ _ You  _ talk funny,” when a girl with long, curly brown hair entered the scene, frowning.

“That’s not very nice, Ira.”

The boy crossed his arms - clearly a sore spot this girl found. “It’s  _ eye-ra _ ,” he whined, huffing and puffing with vigour. 

“No, it’s not,” the girl continued, shaking her head with all the confidence in the world. “My mommy told me it’s said like  _ ee-ra,  _ but most kids can’t make the  _ ee _ sound very well, so  _ your  _ mommy probably just told you it was  _ eye-ra  _ so you wouldn’t feel bad about not being able to say it right.”

And of course this kid was just decimated, making a vaguely feral sound before stomping away, toy car death gripped in his fist. 

Before Newt had a chance to respond, two other boys came crashing into Teresa’s back.

“You’re it!” the first one said, giggling as his friend poked her shoulder repeatedly. They both had the same dark hair as the girl, the first one - the giggler - with darker skin and a trail of scrapes and bruises running up the length of his shins, then the second - the poker - with about one hundred ( _ the highest number ever,  _ Newt thought) freckles dotting over his face, arms, and legs. 

The three of them stood there like that for a second before the two boys noticed Newt standing there awkwardly. 

“Oh, are you playing tag with us?” The giggler asked.

Before he could answer that  _ yes, he would very much like to play tag,  _ Teresa answered for him. “Ira was being mean to him so I made him go away.”

The second one, the poker, frowned quite deeply at this, then stepped forward toward Newt. “Ira stinks. Hi, I’m Thomas.”

“Hi, Thomas, I’m Newt.”

“Woah!” They all gasped in tandem, fidgeting excitedly. 

“He’s Canadian!”

“No, you dummy, he’s  _ French. _ ”

“I don’t think that’s what French sounds like.”

“But  _ mommy  _ told me-”

“Actually, I’m English,” he interjected, not quite sure if he liked all this attention.

The girl rolled her eyes. “Yeah, we’re  _ all  _ English.”

“No, like-”

“I’m Asian.”

“We know, Minho.”

“But I think I’m English too.”

“Y’know, you can be both. Rachel told me that she’s-”

“Where are you from?” The girl cut off the poker, stopping the chatter in its tracks. The three of them looked at him expectantly, waiting for an end to the debate. 

Newt looked up proudly. “I’m from England.”

“He’s British!” the girl exclaimed, and for some reason, the two boys cheered, whooping and hollering for a solid ten seconds. Newt started to laugh.

“I’m Teresa,” the girl said, smiling. “That’s Minho, and this is Thomas. Thomas is my brother-”

“-twin.”

“Thomas is my twin, but Minho isn’t. He has a different family.”

“Cool.”

The giggler - Minho - put his hands on his hips. “Do they have tag in British?”

Then, Newt nodded, and the rest is history.

  
  


He’s eating dinner with Sonya almost a month later when he nearly chokes on a spoonful of rice. 

“Jesus fucking christ.”

Sonya sees the realization drop onto his face and sets her utensils on her plate in anticipation. “What is it?”

He looks at her, eyes wide. He genuinely cannot believe it. 

“Jesus, fucking,  _ christ _ ,” he repeats.

“Oh my god, Newt, what?”

He just shakes his head, unable to speak. He stands up and walks down the hall, heading straight toward his bedroom. There is the vague sound of Sonya following closely behind, excited energy buzzing almost audibly. His hands shake as he opens his laptop, flying through the folders on the copy of Thomas’ desktop at record speeds. 

He forgot. In the thick of the discovery about their mom, he actually forgot. 

After that afternoon with Mary, the two of them took a day or two to really let it process. The aftermath of that was then masked with work and school, lives equilibrating back to whatever version of relative normalcy they’ve been living at for the past two and a half years.

But now, a single, almost-forgotten thought has returned to set it all off balance again.

He sits cross-legged on the floor, back up against the side of his bed. Sonya slots herself in next to him, knees pulled to her chest. She doesn’t say a word but watches diligently over his shoulder as he finds the file he is looking for. 

He double clicks, watching the image fill his screen. 

“It’s the one from the wall,” Sonya observes. Newt doesn’t respond, just scrolls carefully, zooming in.

And at the same time, the two of them: “Holy  _ fuck _ .”

There are words, reflected in his glasses. They’re blurry, but substantially less so that the version pinned up on the wall across from them. 

“Newt, flip it. Flip the picture.” She bats aimlessly at the screen and Newt scrambles to the top menu, accidentally hitting  _ flip horizontal  _ instead of  _ vertical _ , groaning as he has to wait for his ancient piece of garbage computer to undo his mistake, both of them holding their breaths. Eventually, it gets the job done and they stare at a backwards version of Thomas - backwards Thomas, but now correct-facing words.

“Oh my god.”

“Are you - is this real? Newt, is this-”

“I mean, this is the file straight from Teresa’s camera.”

“Someone’s gotta be taking the piss.”

“I don’t understand.”

(That day, as soon as they got home from the hiking, Thomas excused himself to run upstairs and grab his laptop, typing away as the remaining three of them went back and forth over snacks and movie options. 

Newt had leant back, head resting on Thomas’ knee on the couch above where he sat on the ground. “Writing a novel, are we?”

Thomas snorted, taking a second to run his hand affectionately through Newt’s hair before returning to his keyboard. “God, no. Something just - something came to me, earlier, and I just wanna make sure I get it down before I forget.”

“Oh, yeah - when you were muttering in the car earlier?”

This got his attention, typing stopping abruptly and mouth falling open in this incredulous half-smile. “I do not mutter.”

“Oh, you mutter.”

Minho took a pause in his apparently very hot take on  _ The Breakfast Club  _ to interject, “Thomas, you totally mutter. Like, all the time.”

Teresa nodded, and then they all resumed their previous activities:

Minho, passionately ranting about 80’s film.

Teresa, listening intently.

Thomas, typing like it was the end of the world.

And Newt, entirely oblivious.)

_ Something came to me. _

He knew, even back then. 

He  _ knew -  _ right? He had to have known, if this is what he was frantically typing that night? They told him, gave him a heads up? And he just, what? Was alright with that? He didn’t feel the need to take any action? Or tell anyone? Tell  _ Newt?  _ A terrifying thought comes to them: what if he  _ wanted  _ to go? What if he wasn’t taken? It’s entirely possible, now that he thinks about it, and he feels more than a little bit stupid for never considering it before right now - Thomas was obsessed with the angels. He wasn’t scared of them like Teresa, or Newt. He wasn’t outright  _ worshipping  _ them, either, but his apprehensiveness on that front probably had more to do with how Teresa felt rather than his own feelings. Did he abandon them? Something that Mary said pops in his mind then:  _ it’s possible that he didn’t want you two to think she was abandoning you. _

“Newt, come back.” 

Sonya’s hand is suspended in the air, thumb facing upwards as if she’s just snapped her fingers, eyes wide with concern. He blinks a few times, and she exhales. “You there?”

He nods weakly, questions still swarming his mind. “Sorry, yeah.” 

At some point she must have taken the computer from his lap because it sits now in front of them, a couple feet away. Thomas’s face still fills the screen, zoomed in all the way so just his eyes are visible.

And in the reflection of his glasses, the following words, small and blurry, but unmistakable:

_ August 3rd. _

Which, as we all know.

“So, did he know?” Sonya asks, several silent, shocked minutes later. Newt looks over at her and realizes that she doesn’t expect an answer.

Still, “I don’t know,” he says.

“The year is cut off,” she notes, pointing to where the words are obscured by the bridge of Thomas’ glasses. The rest of the page seems to be blank, the bottom of the line above only partially visible as if he had scrolled down to the end of the document, only this last line getting caught in the snapshot. “Think it means anything?”

He leans forward, squinting at the screen. It’s not very clear, but it’s definitely the start of a year:  _ 201-  _ and then it cuts off. There’s no clue as to what the missing number might be, but he can only assume it’s a  _ 4 _ , to make  _ 2014,  _ the year Thomas went missing. 

(A fun fact that makes Newt want to crawl back into that part of his brain where time doesn’t exist and he doesn’t have to participate in reality: that is, already, three years ago.)

“I’m not sure,” he finally answers, because he is still, unfortunately, obligated to participating in this awful reality, the one that suddenly has him questioning everything.

 

The next day, they revisit the wall.

Here is what they know:

Thomas disappeared from Newt’s bedroom sometime between midnight and two in the afternoon on August 3rd, 2014. 

Since then, there’s been three messages -

_ Find me.  _ (Straightforward. Thomas wants Newt to find him.)

_ I’m sorry, I don’t think I can save her.  _ (Initially confusing, but mostly resolved, now - Newt’s mom is somehow in the same boat but for some reason Thomas doesn’t believe that he can save  _ her  _ \- implying that  _ he  _ could be saved?)

_ Don’t trust them.  _ (Jury’s still out on the specific nuances of this one, but most signs point to  _ them  _ being the angels. Exactly what or who they are, and how Newt can tell it’s them and not Thomas, is still unknown.)

There’s been three dreams -

  1. The hill.
  2. The house.
  3. The clearing.



And three accidents -

  1. Minho and the lightning.
  2. Newt and his leg.
  3. Teresa and the statue.



There’s something about the ordering of it that gives him pause, something distinctly  _ off _ , but he chalks it up to that part of his brain that still craves control, the part that is apparently never satisfied. Or maybe, he’s just bitter.

They know that both Teresa and Thomas have had some sort of connection to the angels since they were young (more specifically, since Newt’s mom vanished out of thin air, just like Thomas) but it was Thomas that got consumed by it, abilities moving beyond Teresa’s in a way that none of them really knew the full extent of. 

They know that Newt’s mom had been communicating with Thomas, as early as when they were seven but most recently and more frequently from around when they were fourteen, after Newt’s dad left. 

They know that there are angels in a very large number of the world’s religions, both present and past, and while there are pieces of Thomas in several of them, they are just that: pieces.

They know that he left a book for Newt, countless notes and sketches and poems, each one more cryptic than the last and none of them pointing in any discernible direction.

They know that he was not himself.

They know that it all rests in the scales, Thomas’ life teetering in the crumbling hands of that godforsaken statue.

 

These are the things they do know.

And everything else, they don’t.

 

He waits.

He tries out thinking that maybe Thomas doesn’t  _ want  _ to be saved, but it’s like an ill-fitting suit. He can’t stand it for more than a minute or two, growing increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of it. 

And besides,  _ find me  _ isn’t exactly something someone says when they want to leave everything behind. 

But as the months drag on, Newt is at a loss. He has searched, and searched, and searched, and all he has found is more questions with no answers. He feels himself getting stagnant, feels his will wavering as he faces week after week of nothing: there is no fog in the mornings, no dreams to wake up from. There are no messages, no distinct feelings of  _ thereness.  _ Even the statue, as often as Newt visits, starts to seem more and more like just a statue, no longer a monument to Thomas’ obsession but an eroding figure of his own resolve as the moss eats away at the integrity of its structure, fragile and fading.

He has a hard time wrapping his head around how Thomas ever revered it.

(There is, still, a breath of fear that whistles through the space between his ribs, looking up at the shadows over its cheeks.

Each time, he leaves an offering of gardenia, stark white against the dirtied surface of the stone.

And each time, it is gone when he returns.)

All through the Summer he begs for a sign. He returns to the church, kneeling awkwardly in the pews, ignoring the pain in his bad leg, praying - praying for something, for  _ anything.  _

He burns the skin off his fingers.

He writes letters.

He sends texts.

He leaves voicemails, and hopes that that whole thing goes both ways.

He considers calling Teresa, but he thinks that might make things worse. He’d skyped with her a couple days after the last message and she’d  _ seemed  _ fine, which led him to believe that maybe she wasn’t getting the messages anymore. 

And if she was finally free of this nightmare, who was he to drag her back in?  
Minho isn’t exactly an option either - it’s been a full year since he left, now, and while they’ve occasionally texted back and forth, it’s all surface level. 

( _ Hey, how have you been doing? _

_ Oh, good, just working, as always. And you? How’s school? _

_ School’s hard, but good. _

_ Nice. _

_ Yeah.) _

There’s Sonya, of course, but there are things Newt can’t tell even her, despite their agreement of no more secrets, decided upon when he slipped up about their mom. Whether it’s things he can’t explain or just won’t - well that line is a little blurred, now. He doesn’t know if it’s a matter of articulation or if it’s that fierce, foreign sense of protectiveness that washes over him every so often, the one that says  _ this is mine  _ and renders him crouched over the memory of Thomas like a horrible little goblin. He doesn’t know if there’s a difference, or if he even has a choice. 

(It is another thing, one he cannot or will not explain - the way he feels like he is just watching, a spectator in his own life as the  _ right  _ decisions are known in his mind, appearing with no preamble; a pretense - but only for a second, before that haunting calm takes him over.

Yes, he should burn his fingers.

No, he should not tell Sonya.

Yes, he should kneel at the statue.

No, he should not care that these things come easier and easier, like second nature.

Yes, he should trust his intuitions.

Wait - no,  _ no _ , he shouldn’t trust them. He can’t trust them.

He can’t trust them.)

 

The battle is a losing one, and the thick haze of Summer doesn’t help. The heat pulls itself over him like a blanket, and the moments of clarity become fleeting. He finds that there are stretches of time he doesn’t remember, floating through one day to the next. Sonya appears in his room at night, eyes full of tears.

“Liz, what’s wrong?”

The nickname takes Sonya aback just as much as it does Newt, the two of them blinking confusedly at each other for a second before she shakes her head.

“You were yelling in your sleep again.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

 

Mary looks at him like he’s a ghost, walking on eggshells.

Alby spends half his time repeating what he’s just said, patience running thin.

And everyone else, well.

Newt doesn’t really have an everyone else, anymore.

  
  


He continues on like this, half-living, half-dying, and only half-caring. He is rising, rising, crafting a new home in the atmosphere, losing sight of the remains of the thing he once called his life below-

And then it all comes crashing down.

  
  


It is the third day of August, too early yet to be called morning.

He’s walking home from work and as the sun rises over the rooftops, he sees the sunlight streaming through the fog, thick and moist on his fingertips as he comes to a stop in the middle of the street. 

(The first time he and Thomas kissed, it was on the porch.

It was lightning quick - blink and you’ve already missed it. 

Newt was even faster, on his bike and halfway down the road before Thomas could even register what was happening.)

When he gets to his house, he slips into his room as quietly as possible, grabbing a pack of sticky notes from his desk drawer and bringing them into the kitchen, sharpie smell mixing with last night’s dinner, casserole dish still soaking in the sink. He finishes off his note with a smiley face, peeling it from the pack and sticking it on the fridge for Sonya to find when she wakes up. 

She’s been a little more on top of him lately, not bothering to hide her worry when he comes and goes at weird hours without mentioning anything beforehand, or when he zones out for entire meals, not even taking a bite in the time it takes her to finish. He pretends not to notice her checking in on him on the mornings when he comes home from work at sunrise, opening the door to his bedroom as quietly and as carefully as possible so that it doesn’t creak, just to make sure he’s still there.

And last week, as he was driving her to school:

“It’s like you’re not even here, sometimes.”

“You know I just zone out a lot.”

“No, Newt, this is different. I’m - I’m  _ scared. _ ”

He makes sure his message is front and center on the fridge:

_ out early today - love you! _

(It was eighth grade graduation, and his parents were throwing a party. Newt was, naturally, the last to leave.

They lingered. Neither wanted to go back to their respective homes, the concrete of Thomas’ porch their very own in-between.

Gravity was pulling them down, pulling them toward each other.)

Satisfied with his work, he heads back outside, this time through the back. The sun still hasn’t yet warmed the morning air, and the difference in temperature when he enters the greenhouse is nearly suffocating. He ignores it anyway, heading to the back where the flowers rest in their colourful corner.

He cuts off the final three bulbs of gardenia that remain on the bush, and then makes his way into the woods with a newfound clarity, every step of the way rooting him to the Earth as it crunches under his feet.

(“Bye, Newt.”

“Bye, Tommy.”

And then, like a man possessed, he leant forwards. Thomas’ breath caught in his throat and then it was lips on lips, scarcely a brush.)

As he is walking, he wonders how many times he has done this. It must be in the hundreds, now. The route is ingrained into his muscle memory, legs maneuvering him over stray roots and rocks before he even remembers they’re there. He notices the way the light hits a certain tree - the one with the branch that curled down instead of up, bark peeled off near the base - and he knows that it isn’t much longer. Five minutes, maybe. The forest is alive around him, breathing him forward with each exhale, sending him further into the belly of the beast, until, finally-

He stands at the heart of it all, feeling like a culmination. 

(Newt cried that entire night, not sleeping for even one minute. He was certain that he had ruined it all, that he had ruined absolutely everything good in his life and that he was going to die and-

-and then there was Thomas, just under of eight hours later, waiting on his doorstep with a nervous fist full of gardenia and a nervous face full of hope.)

This time, something is different. It feels electric, pulsing through the air in thick waves coming in from every direction, holding him still where he stands, feet locked into the Earth. The smell of wet dirt floods the air, almost like the scent that comes with rain, but a glance upwards tells him that that’s impossible, the sky a brilliant, uninterrupted blue. He half expects it when the tingling starts next: calves, arms, neck. It’s almost too much to handle, like he’s vibrating out of his skin, tension building and building with no signs of yielding, and then-

And then, he is not alone. 

The angel looms down over him, sword raised over his head ready to strike him down, to put him in the ground once and for all, to bury him in grief and guilt and righteousness, slicing each finger clean to the root, piling tall in the never-changing scales.

But this is not the presence he feels, deep in his bones, deep in the Earth beneath his feet, rooting inextricably to the  _ here _ , to the  _ now,  _ to the unspoken world where he has not breathed, not existed, not graced - not since Newt last felt alive, not since a breath away from three years, down to the very last fraction of a second - where he emerges now, as soft and tender as the day he last lingered behind the towering symbol of loss, face blank and searching:

Thomas.

He breathes the words like a ghost, flickering.

“Newt, what are you doing here?”

There is a lightness to his words, painted over with confusion as his eyes narrow slightly, head tilting.

And Newt:

“It’s been three bloody years, Tommy.”

He stops, eyelashes hammering against the tops of his cheeks like the wings of a butterfly as his mouth opens and shuts. 

Then, a white hot pain begins to sear through Newt - calves, arms, neck - as Thomas’ skin starts to turn red, bloody,  _ shivering _ , the same two words (the first words, you know the ones) etch over and over again into his calves, his arms, his neck - pulsing, warping,  _ pouring,  _ until-

He looks up, eyes wide and urgent before they go vacant, whispering his three final words before he collapses to the ground.

“Don’t trust them.”


	4. après

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (they are trying to keep me. i am right here.)

**To: reese murphy**

_This message has been deleted_ [6:14am]

 _This message has been deleted_ [6:14am]

 _This message has been deleted_ [6:14am]

 

**From: reese murphy**

hey everything ok?? [9:34am]

 

**To: reese murphy**

yeah [10:12am]

sorry [10:12am]

i’ll explain later [10:18am]

 

Sitting in their living room, there is a boy that looks like Thomas.

 

For the first part of the day, he thought that maybe it was just the trauma of it all catching up with him. When Newt had been into his whole phase on yuppies and hippies communicating with angels, he’d read a lot of first hand accounts of people who had apparently seen or spoken to them. There were a few that mentioned something along the lines of what Thomas seems to be experiencing now - a completely catatonic state.

So, he waits.

He expects the shock and the trauma of it all to hit _him,_ knocking him off his feet and sending him into a state of euphoria, or make him cry for ten hours straight, or - or _something,_ ‘cause for fuck’s sake, Thomas is _sitting on his couch_ \- but he seems to be stuck on shock, so emotionally neutral that it starts to scare him.

(Or: maybe it’s because he knows, somewhere deep inside, that this is not yet over.)

 

Thomas does not cry.

He does not ask for his family.

He looks at Newt like he is not there.

 

Newt and Sonya are in the kitchen, voices low.

“Well what do we do?”

“I don’t know, Sonya.”

“He seems…”

“I know.”

Her eyebrows are drawn together, deep creases across her forehead. It is nothing like the picture of surprise she was only five hours prior, shattering her mug of tea in the sink as it fell from her hands the moment that Newt - _and Thomas_ \- appeared through the glass of the back door that morning.  
Thomas was barely conscious, Newt having half-dragged him the entire way home as he trembled, eyes rolling freely each time his head moved. They set him down on the couch, not even remotely caring about the dirt caked onto every inch of him. And then, with tears in his eyes:

“I found him, Son.”

There was much crying and much hugging after that, Thomas asleep on the couch. He’d woken up a couple hours later, and since then, it had been this:

“Newt, I don’t know if he’s - if that’s entirely _him._ ”

He doesn’t want her to be right, be he knows that she is. Thomas is a hollow shell of himself, twitchy and faraway. Newt looks over and sees him staring straight ahead, unblinking.

“Have you talked to Teresa yet?”

“God, no.”

Sonya takes a deep breath, looking like she wants to tear her eyes away from Thomas, like a statue on their couch, but can’t. Finally, she turns her head, looking at Newt. “Yeah, that’s probably a good call.”

Newt nods. “I don’t know what we would tell her. ‘Hey, I found your brother, but he’s kind of acting like a vegetable and I’m not sure if he’s still, like possessed or whatever.’ No, don’t think that would go too well.”

She bites her lip. “I think we should call Minho.” Newt raises an eyebrow, and she sighs again. “I mean, obviously we can’t handle this ourselves.”

“Have you talked to him lately?”

“Yeah, I have.”

He tries not to react to that, keeping his face in what he hopes is a neutral expression. “Alright, I guess it can’t hurt.”

 

When Sonya is on the phone with Minho, Newt braves the living room once more. He hesitates - he’s not sure if he wants to sit beside him, afraid that if he gets too close, he’ll vanish again. He settles for a spot on the floor vaguely in front of the couch and waits to see if Thomas will notice that he’s there.

His skin no longer looks raw, no stinging red lines in the shapes of letters like Newt had sworn he’d seen in the forest earlier that morning, but he is so pale that he almost appears translucent, sickly green undertones tinting the distended flesh. He notices now, up close, that Thomas’ lips are moving, silent words muttered over and over again.

“What’s that, love?” Newt asks softly, his voice faltering on the _love_.

(The boy sitting in front of him - that is not his love.)

Thomas blinks hard, flinching almost violently backwards as his mouth falls open, eyes fluttering for a moment and then finally settling on Newt. His face softens, corners of his lips ghosting vaguely upwards as his chest begins to stutter with thin breaths.

“Hey,” he whispers, and then there’s that warmth flooding in again, lighting up his face and consequently, Newt’s world.

This is him. This is _Tommy._

Newt chokes back a sob and reaches out, Thomas’s hand mirroring his, the world in slow motion, unturning as the only thing that matters comes to a grinding halt with the rest of the Earth. The moment their fingertips brush sends a burning jolt of electricity crackling up Newt’s arm at lightning speed and he can do nothing but rip his hand away, feeling in his fingertips scarcely there as he looks up to find that Thomas has gone vacant once more.

There is something like deflation, and Newt just feels _tired._

It has been three long, long years.

And he got him back for _one second._

Before he can retreat further into the the cumulation of his exhaustion, Sonya clears her throat. “Minho’s on his way.”

 _Oh, right._ “He is?”

She smiles. “Yeah.”

 

Minho is five hours away, so all they can do is wait. After the first hour Sonya suddenly gasps, turning to Newt with a vicious expression painting her features.

“You haven’t slept!” she realizes, mouth dropping open in horror.

Newt blinks, and tries to remember. Last night, he worked an overnight shift, and then he went home, and - _oh, duh._ He gives her an awkward smile, caught.

She points down the hall. “Go. Now.”

“I am _not_ sleeping right now,” he says, gesturing to Thomas, unconscious once again on the couch opposite them.

Her eyes roll into the back of her head and she groans, nearly slamming her head on the coffee table. “Minho’s not gonna be here for another four hours. Nothing’s gonna happen in between then and now.”

“But Thomas-”

“Will be right there, and I will be right here watching him. Newt, just go to sleep.”

He wants to protest, but the sweet call of sleep is already pulling him under. “Fine,” he says finally, pulling a fleece blanket from the basket beside his armchair.

“Newt.”

“I’m _gonna_ sleep, but it’s going to be right here,” he says, smiling triumphantly as she rolls her eyes. “Wake me up if anything happens.”

“Obviously.”

 

When he falls asleep, Thomas is there.

It’s not exactly a dream, but:

_Newt, I need you to keep going. I need you to keep looking._

He is surrounded by nothing and yet it still suffocates him, enveloped in void. Thomas’ voice is the only thing, somehow cutting through it all.

 _I need you to_ think. _There’s something you’re missing._

Newt screams. He’s not sure if it makes any noise - _what is it? What am I missing?_ But it is empty again, Thomas gone, and Newt is about to give up, consciousness about to pull him back into the world, and then-

_There’s something you haven’t done. You know what it is._

 

And then, he wakes up.

 

It’s still light out when his eyes drag open, confusion spiking through him for just a moment before he remembers where he is, and exactly how his day’s panned out up until this point.

And before it can fade to the back of his mind, he grabs hold of Thomas’ words.

Something he hasn’t done - something he hasn’t done? The cogs of his brain are still clogged with sleep, nothing obvious flying out at him immediately. He decides to file it away for later, rubbing his eyes and opening them again to find Thomas staring directly at him, vacant but somehow _there,_ somehow distinctly present behind the film clouding his eyes.

“Newt!” It’s not Sonya’s voice that tears his eyes away but Minho, appearing in the kitchen with a soft, surrendering smile on his lips.

There’s a moment where they both pause, unsure, but then Newt is on his feet and Minho is striding over, the two of them colliding somewhere in the middle with their arms wrapped around each other, holding tight.

They spend the rest of the afternoon catching him up to speed on everything that’s happened in the past year, both Thomas-wise and personally. It feels, surprisingly, easier than it has in a long, long time, arguably on par with _before._

“I like the hair,” Minho says, nodding to the messy bun that Newt’s thrown it up into, already halfway to falling out. “You, too. You guys kinda switched,” he directs it now to Sonya, her hands flying self consciously up to the ends of her hair, an inch or two below her chin now.

“Thanks.”

Thomas flits in and out of consciousness, not moving from the couch for the entire evening. There are moments, ones where he seems like he might be on the edge of himself again, but it’s always fleeting. Newt doesn’t say anything about what he dreamt just yet - he’s not even sure if it really _was_ Thomas, or just his subconscious brain supplying him with random dream fodder.

As nightfall approaches, the three of them start to get antsy.

“We could do shifts,” Sonya suggests, elbows propped up on the table.

Minho tilts his head, frowning slightly. “Maybe,” he says, after swallowing a bite of now cold pizza. He looks over to Thomas, then back to Sonya. “Is he - can he hear us?”

“I don’t actually know.” Her voice is a whisper now.

Thomas, the literal elephant in the room, remains where he has been sitting for over twelve hours now, twitching every couple of minutes or so. Initially, Newt and Sonya had expected him to come around at some point during the day.

Now, they’re not so sure.

She sighs for what seems like the hundredth time that day. “Regardless, we have to sleep at some point.”

Newt and Minho nod in tandem. This is no time to be needlessly headstrong.

“I’ll go first,” Minho says.

“No, I already slept this afternoon, I can go first.”

Well, maybe they’re not _quite_ over the whole stubborn thing.

They end up agreeing for Minho to sleep first, at one in the morning.

But, before they can make it that far, Newt figures it out.

“Fuck!” he yells, jolting up from his chair, nearly knocking over the table and the leftover pizza in the process. Sonya and Minho flinch back, regarding Newt with what is probably the appropriate amount of shock.

He barely even notices.

“Of _course_ , I knew there was something off about that whole thing!”

“Newt, what?”

He doesn’t answer Sonya, mind running too fast to even absorb her question, everything suddenly falling into place:

The hill, the house, the statue.

Minho, him, and - no, _not_ Teresa.

He knows what he has to do.

“Stay here,” he says, pointing a shaking finger at his sister and his best friend, the two of them just staring back at him with wide eyes. “I know how to fix this.”

And then he is stumbling to pull his shoes on, slamming his heel awkwardly with each step as he rushes down the hall. He doesn’t go for the front door or the back, but the garage. It is dark, the air mustier than any part of their crumbling house. The light crackles to life and he spots the hockey stick sitting on the far shelf a moment later, legs surging forward like gravity is pulling him in, the tape circled around the end thin and worn as he holds it in his hands.

He flicks off the light, slams the door, and marches back through the house - past Sonya, past Minho, past the Thomas that is not Thomas - and through the back door, toward the answer to all of this.

The other times, he was just chasing his dreams blindly, searching desperately for a meaning that he wasn’t even sure was going to be there. And each time, something had happened - Minho getting struck by lightning, him breaking his leg. It had been _them,_ and they were angry; they were angry because he was _close_ , because it wasn’t his own subconscious that was guiding him but Thomas, leading the way all along.

This time, is different.

This time, he knows what he is charging headfirst into. And they’re going to be angry, but this time, it won’t be him that suffers.

The moon is nearly full, lighting the way as he flies over the trail, every step more charged than the last. He doesn’t bother checking between the trees. He doesn’t care. It’s like this power running through him, an awful energy that propels him forward, angels be damned. There is nothing else they can do to hurt him, now. He is almost there, and then it will be over.

The sky is bright and clear. Polaris sits behind him, watching.

He steps into the clearing like an arena, hockey stick ready to wield. Fog rises off the ground, settling level midway up Newt’s shins, like a cloud swirling at the angel’s ankles, raised up on its platform. He takes a deep breath, crisp nighttime air awakening every cell in his body, entire existence at attention and ready to fight.

And then, he begins.

The blade of the stick connects first with the wrist, slicing through the stone as if it was butter. He stops then, letting his arms hang limp as he watches the scales tumble to the ground, crumbling on impact. Time stops, just for a moment, and it’s suspended in the air - perfectly weightless and trays finally balanced, an arbitrary victory, small battle under his belt when he’s about to win the entire goddamn war - and then it shatters in slow motion, pieces turning to dust as they disappear below the barrier of mist, sinking into the ground below.

After that, it’s a bloodbath.

He goes for the tip of the sword, next, its blade splitting in two as it lands on the shoulder, dust crumbling off of that, too. After that is the head, along with it the arm holding what’s left of the sword, the entire top third of the statue coming down with a sickening _crack._ Newt barely hears it, continuing on without a second thought as he rams the end of the hockey stick into it’s torso, chipping away at the soft, eroded stone with ease. At some point he starts yelling - deep, guttural, and entirely feral, screams ripping from his throat with each swing he takes. After an amount of time - it could be minutes or millenia and Newt would never be the wiser - he sinks to his knees, working on the thick, rectangular pedestal, the stone bending and breaking to his every will, butt end of the hockey stick carving into it.

And then, it is over.

The smell rising off the ground burns his nostrils, sulfuric. He stands, using his makeshift weapon now as a crutch, slowly backing himself out to the edge of the clearing, hands clutched to his chest like a shield as he regards his work - his _destruction._ The ground is coated in a blanket of white, like pale dirt ready to be incorporated back into the Earth, finally at rest.

 

He can see Sonya and Minho’s jaws dropping from halfway across the backyard, the two of them rising from the floor and squinting out the back door into the night. Before he can reach the house, Sonya slides open the door and slips out.

“Christ, Newt, what _happened_ to you?”

He stops in his tracks. “What?”

“You look like a bloody ghost.” She gestures to, well, all of him, and he looks down. Now, with the light from the living room through the glass, he can see that he is a living statue, coated in dust from the rubble of his destruction.

“And the _smell_ ,” she continues, taking a step back, “like rotten eggs.”

He runs his hands through his hair, shaking out all the dust. “Sorry.”

The air is still for a moment, and then Sonya’s face sobers. Newt knows, before she even says it.

“He’s disappeared again.”

“No,” he says, quiet, barely a whisper. “No, that’s - that can’t be right. I did - I _did what he told me_ .” _There’s something you’re missing._ It was the last dream - it was the statue, and he took care of it. It should be over, now.

But what if _over_ didn’t mean what he wanted it to mean?

This is what they do: they take, and take, and they never give. Why would he think it would be any different, this time? How could he be so naive - to think that he really believed he had the upper hand, that _he_ , of all people, could end this. That he could save Thomas, or find him, or-

“No. There has to be a way.” A sudden resolve comes over him and he drops the hockey stick, brushing past Sonya into the house. “There has to be a way,” he repeats, pacing past Minho and into the kitchen. He turns on the tap, washing the grime off his hands and arms.

“What happened, exactly?” he asks, wheels turning. _Something I’m missing._

Minho clears his throat. “He was just sitting there, like he has been, but then he started? Like, shaking again? But worse - like, convulsing, almost. And then he just stopped, all of a sudden, and he looked right at me and he said, ‘I’m right here’, and just - he fucking vanished. I blinked and then he wasn’t there.”

Newt stops breathing. “He - he said _what_?”

“I’m right here,” Minho repeats. “I don’t know if - if that means anything else to you, but I took it as, like, he’s still _here_ , and not wherever he _was._ ”

Newt starts pacing up and down the kitchen. _I’m right here. I’m right here._ Where has he heard that before? He can hear Thomas’ voice saying it, words quiet and smooth. His brain is a box of television static, moment of freak clarity long gone, falling down from the high of the clearing. His memories feel like tar, thick and slow. _I’m right here._

_I’m right here._

He pivots, eyes catching on the bright green square affixed to the fridge door - his note to Sonya from that morning.

There’s a beat, and then it’s there:

It was the day before it happened, on the phone. Thomas had zoned out, and Newt had asked him:

“Where’d you go?”

With the chaos of everything that had happened just 24 hours later, Newt had nearly forgotten. It was buried deep, deep in the turmoil of his mind - he wonders how much of that was him, and how much was _them_ \- and left there to slowly fade away, just one tiny, insignificant moment among millions of others that have come to pass since then.

“I’m right here.”

“And where’s that?”

He’s missing something, and he knows what it is.

“My house.”

He must look like a madman, because both Minho and Sonya are standing, watching him with growing trepidation.

And then Sonya, somehow, _knows_ , because she smiles.

“Go get him.”

 

And so, he does.

 

(In the middle of nowhere, there is a small, small town called Providence.

In this town, there is a boy named Newt.

In this town, there is a boy named Thomas.)

 

There is no god, no force of nature that could stop him as he drives through town, every twist and turn automatic as his heart beats in his throat. He doesn’t give the _for sale_ sign a second glance as he pulls into the driveway, cutting the engine and flying up the porch, security camera chiming like a symphony in his ears. His hands don’t shake as he finds his key, turning with a final-sounding _click_ as he opens the door and steps over the threshold for the first time in two years.

After that it’s gravity pulling him up the stairs, feet planting firmly on steps that don’t collapse. His fingers are numb and it’s a welcome sensation, that damned electricity finally absent, divine energy expelled from him, from this house, from this _world -_ just gone. His legs take him down to the end of the hall and stop short of Thomas’ door.

He takes a breath, and then another.

 

(The world stops, waiting.)

 

Sitting on the bed, there is a boy that looks like Thomas.

Standing in the doorway, there is a boy that looks like Newt.

 

(Somewhere, far away, an angel has fallen.)

 

And then, in the space between, there are two boys collapsing into each other.

These are the first words that follow, once arms have untangled and breaths have slowed:

 

“Your hair.”

“My hair?”

“It’s longer.”

“Yeah, yeah it is, Tommy.”

“I like it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You should keep it like that.”

“Hm.”

 

There’s a moment, just a small one, a tiny pebble in the pocket of reality, where the two of them are silent, tears still streaming down their faces but with smiles wider and hearts louder than ever before. It’s in this moment that everything is, just for second, normal - beautifully, simply, fleetingly: normal. And then-

Thomas’ breath catches in his throat and it turns into a sob, smile falling as he presses his forehead into Newt’s once more, voice cracking.

“You found me.”

“I never stopped looking.”

“I know, Newt.” He lets out a stuttering breath and smiles like there is a universe inside of him - he is no longer divine, but he is free. “I know.”

 

☙

 

**Author's Note:**

> hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
> 
> well i guess thats just OVER now isnt it?? boy if you made it this far. thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this monster of a fic. if it so behooves you, i would love to hear any sort of thoughts anyone has????? ie give me validation blease i love to #interact yell at me and ill yell back 100%
> 
> also! if anyone wants to see my visual inspiration for all o' this, you can check out my pinterest board [here](https://www.pinterest.ca/brenderesa/fic-providence/). this entire fic sprung out of a Single pin so the hash tag aesthetic has been pretty vital in the process of this.
> 
> i guess i have to leave now?? whack. come hang out with me on [tumblr](http://00250.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/wcckd) if u wanna keep this spooky sexy party goin


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